Picture the scene: You’re in your studio, the creative juices flowing liberally and freely, working on what is sure to be the most important moment in the history of music since John turned to Paul and said “D’you fancy forming a band, mate?”. You’re in the zone. Every note a symphony, every EQ adjustment, compressor tweak and fader move a perfectly judged masterstroke. And then it happens:
“Windows will now restart to install updates.”
The situation is little better with macOS. It may not be quite so insistent on installing updates whenever it feels like it, but Apple’s treadmill of incessant OS version updates can often leave mission-critical hardware, software and workflows broken and non-functional. Particularily if you’re a user of the older end of the software world.
With every update, the walls of Apple’s and Microsoft’s ‘walled gardens’ grow higher. Sure, Microsoft’s ankle-high bordering comes in stark contrast to the towering edifices surrounding Apple’s plot, but it, seemingly, also envies and admires those walls, and is slowly raising its own by way of response.
Windows and macOS run many background tasks that may be entirely irrelevant to how you use your computer, or be tasks you actively do not want running – snooping and analytics, for example. This stuff gobbles up the raw computing power you paid for when buying the machine, yet even if you disable unwanted features, they’ll invariably be re-enabled by the next OS update.
In short, your right to choose your computer’s software, hardware, features, workflows and update cycles has been lost. But what to do?
The only potential alternative is Linux. As a general purpose OS for web, email, document writing and such, there’s nowadays little to choose between Linux and the ‘Big Two’. But what about music production? Does Linux yet have the hardware and software support that would make it a good fit in the studio? The short answer is “yes”…
What is Linux?
Get to know some of the key Linux lingo, and the flexible ‘kernel’ at its core
The first thing to understand about Linux is that there is no single Linux operating system but rather a Linux kernel that’s used as the core of many different operating systems. (A kernel is the core code of an OS that’s loaded into memory and run when the system boots.)
The Linux kernel is free and open-source software, aka “FOSS”. This means that anybody can use the kernel without paying a fee, and that anybody can view the source code, search it for bugs and vulnerabilities, make their own modifications, and submit code changes to be considered for inclusion in the official kernel.
Unless you are a developer, though, the Linux kernel on its own is not very useful. To become useful it needs to be wrapped up with system software, tools and applications – in other words it needs to be built into a full operating system.
Distros, desktops and repos
An OS built on the Linux kernel is known as a Linux ‘distro’, short for distribution. There are many distros kicking about, and whilst some include proprietary code and so aren’t FOSS, many are developed by communities of developers and remain free to use and fully open source. Therefore, as with the kernel, you can view and modify the source code, make contributions, or even ‘fork’ the code to adapt into your own operating system. Indeed, many distros
