Hey there Linux community. I’ve been interested in Linux lately and have been considering switching to Linux Mint from windows 11. My main pc is a Surface Laptop Studio with an intel i7, 32g ram, 1 terabyte ssd, and an rtx 3050 ti gpu. I’m thinking about trying out dual booting to see how I like it, but I have some questions.

I use my laptop for a lot of creative work, video editing, web design, music production, photography, etc. I’m not too worried about it because I’ve come across many promising FOSS alternatives, but there’s some software I’d like to ask about specifically. I ditched Adobe Premiere in favor of Davinci Resolve a while ago and I know that there’s a native Linux version of Resolve, and I’m just curious about how well that runs for the people that use it?

As far as music production goes I’m an avid user of Ableton Live. It’s been my go to for years and I know that support for it on Linux isn’t the best, if it’s even there at all. I’ve seen a few people claim they’ve gotten it working but it seems a little suspicious to me. So to anyone in the music space, what are the best Linux supported alternatives? Or, in the event I decide to switch, should I maintain my dual boot setup to just stick with Ableton?

I’m also pretty locked into the Microsoft ecosystem with OneDrive (I get a terabyte of cloud storage for free so it’s where almost all of my files are). I’m in the process of trying to setup my own cloud storage with nextcloud or something similar, but until then I’m curious if I’d be able to set up OneDrive live file syncing in my Linux environment, similar to how it works on windows? If anyone has any experience with that I’d love to hear some input.

Not something that’s absolutely necessary, but I’m just curious if the touch support of my laptop would be maintained. Since it’s a surface device it’s actually a really nice touch screen, and the pen input is great, my wife borrows it for digital drawing sometimes and loves it. I don’t use it all the time but I do occasionally and it’d be a huge plus if it still worked just as well.

I think those are pretty much the only things holding me back from fully dedicating myself to switching, so I’d really appreciate some input. Thanks!

  • @undrivendev
    2•3 hours ago

    I support what some of the people here say: don’t do a hard switch.

    Install Linux in dual boot (or, if possible, use a dedicated machine) and see how it goes. You can always fallback to Windows if needed.

    My 2 cents:

    • Stick to one distro/DE combination, otherwise you’ll get burnt out by decision fatigue. As a beginner I suggest to stick to Ubuntu LTS as a base and KDE as a DE. These are very mature options and IMO everything you’ll ever need until you become an expert (and then you can start exploring more DEs combinations and/or use more advanced distros like Arch). My suggestions: KDE Neon or Kubuntu LTS.
    • In terms of software I can suggest Kdenlive for basic video editing, DaVinci Resolve for pro video editing, REAPER as a full featured DAW, Bitwig Studio as an Ableton Live replacement. For image editing I know that GIMP 3.0 is coming and seems promising as a semi-pro alternative. These options comes with native support on Linux and many of them are professional-grade software choices.
    • In terms of OneDrive, there’s no Linux client AFAIK. If you are not interested in syncing the files locally, you can use the web version, but it’s not ideal. As an alternative, you can use something like rclone to sync files to/from OneDrive, but requires some setup work.