My first-time look at Pop!_OS 22.04 from System76 that features it's very own Cosmic Desktop along with lots of other features.
Based on Ubuntu 22.04, but with some very interesting differences.
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▶️ 3Speak
The new studio looks NICE! You done a good job on it so far!
I am in love with Pop!OS also. I've been using it for work & play for a month or so now. I cant believe I never gave it a fair shake before. The Cosmic desktop is so frickin smooth and everything just works. I went all in on it and even hooked up all of my online accounts and email for work and play.
I keep UbuntuMATE on a second ssd around as a fall back for whatever distro I'm using always seems to go berserk. Im actually giving Pop!OS one more week. Then I'm wiping that second ssd into storage and going all in on Pop.
If it then goes berserk on me I will be pissed, lol.
As for Pipewire I used to be a hater of it. But now that I know how to create sinks & sources in the config file it's gotten a lot easier.
Helvum is cool, I use qpwgraph more. But just so you know Qjackctl and Carla both work out of the box with Pipewire too. No jackd required. Lol.
I think I'm going to end up being the guy in the Linux world that goes around saying "I use Pop!OS by the way". ROFL!
Thank you! And yes I still have more plans for the studio, but having it painted and the new desk was the main thing.
Just like you though, I kind of ignored Pop-OS until now and it's surprisingly very good.
I'm sort of stuck with Ubuntu 18.04 on my main computer though just because I have so much software set up and configured. I know if I switch there's going to be something that I need that isn't going to work. Most likely something related to music software, but there's always something.
And yes, Pipewire was a shock at first. I'm just so accustomed to routing stuff from JACK out to Pulseaudio and back in etc and so forth. I'll have to look into qpwgraph though.
I didn't even realize I could use QJackCtl and Calf without having Jack 1 or 2 installed though, but that makes sense and I'm glad you mentioned that because I'll have to do some more testing.
But now thinking about it, don't those have Jackd as a dependency?
Some other distros I'm thinking about testing are Zorin, Endeavour OS, Nitrux, and maybe even Garuda and Solus.
EndevourOS is fricking awesome. Especially their implementation of i3. It's beautiful and super lightweight. I was using it right before I fell in love with Pop!OS.
Probably would have stayed. But I have a love hate relationship with Arch.
I'm done maintaining a distro. Don't need cutting edge but still want new stuff.
Pop is a nice sweet spot.
Arch is actually what I was using prior to Ubuntu 18.04.
When I finally installed Linux on my gaming computer I went with Arch because at that time Ubuntu didn't have the best Radeon support? It was right when AMDGPU was new, and they had basically discontinued the proprietary one, but AMDGPU was lacking audio over HDMI(which I need). So I went with Arch for over a year, and had no problems at all. But my liquid cooling system started failing, and I moved to another box entirely and decided to go with Ubuntu 18.04 because I hadn't tried it since they moved to Gnome.
I plan to get back to Arch because I really do miss the AUR.
I agree the AUR is really really hard for anybody to compete with. But I'm personally to the point that I dont want to be a sys admin. I've had my fun time learning and just want to be able to hop on the computer and get some stuff done. Then go play outside in the real world and enjoy what time I have left.
Another fun one to check out is AV Linux. Done be scared of the website with no ssl cert. It's good.
It's at https://bandshed.net.
It's developed by Glen McArthur. He made for himself and his band orginially. It's ended up growing a sizeable fan base. I've used many times off and on over the years. Used to be debian based but has since moved to being based on MXLinux. Has an XFCE desktop with Openbox for the window manager. He also released a LXQT version as well. I just downloaded that and going to check it out tonight. Lol.
Still staying with Pop though.
See that's exactly why I'm still using Ubuntu 18.04. Even if I were to just move to 22.04 I know I'd be troubleshooting things, and even things I rarely use. Just knowing that some tiny feature is missing will drive me crazy lol.
And oh yes I am very familiar with AV Linux! It was like my learning lab for JACK because everyone online made it seem like JACK and Pulseaudio were a nightmare to get working together so I grabbed another computer and installed AV Linux, but this was back when it was still Debian based. I used that and KX-Studio as a shopping list too, and then installed everything I liked manually on Arch.
I still have Arch installed on that machine collecting dust. I have to take it apart and try to figure out why the liquid cooling isn't working.
But yes, AV Linux is awesome because it comes with so many plug-ins, tools, and DAWs/Synths pre-installed. It used to ship with the hard Realtime Preempt kernel for low-latency, but now it uses the Liquorix performance kernel. I need to give it another try because a lot has changed.
Do you ever use VM's to try out distros? That's my preferred method because it makes recording my videos a lot easier. I think I have like 30 VM's installed on this machine right now. I used to run VMware ESXi on a server here that hosted all of my VM's including my server VM"s, and I could log into it with VMware Workstation and it was just like running the VM's locally. But Virutalbox and KVM with Virt-Manager work just as well.
KX Studio, I forgot about that one! LOL. One of my favorites. As a side note The KX Studio dev is one of the main devs on Pipewire. FaulxTX.
Yes check out the latest AVL you wont be disappointed. The only thing that I dont like about the new AVLinux is the theme. Its decent and usable but the cursor. Looks a little cheesy. LOL.
VM's I've used before just to do a quick look at something. But if I want to seriously look at distro I just install it. That way I get the full experience. Also up till a couple of years ago didn't have a machine with enough horsepower to run a proper VM. So I never really looked into getting a proper VM set up.
Pipewire has jack built into it.