Are we Linux yet?

I created this page to track — based on all the software I use daily — whether I can switch my main Windows workstation Hyperion to Linux seamlessly. It's based on my Uses page, but won't be kept up-to-date at the same pace. I typically do this exercise once a year after Windows does something to really annoy me.

Here's the scoring system —

• 🌕 Success: you're good to go on most of the major Linux distros.
• 🌗 Partial fail: you might need another computer, a VM or Wine to use this.
• 🌑 Fail: you definitely need another computer or a VM. Wine is useless here.

Software

This is not an exhaustive list — I have omitted certain essentials that are easily replaced with equivalents so as not to cause confusion. Terminal emulators, PDF readers, podcast and music players, etc. are easily replaced with almost identical alternatives or are simply browser-based and have no need to be ported.

Daily

• 🌕 Obsidian

Art / Design

• 🌕 Krita
• 🌕 Aseprite
• 🌕 PureRef
• 🌑 Affinity Suite

There's no official support for the Affinity Suite from Serif. Some promising Wine experiments on the forums, however, but none I have ever seen working with my own two eyes.

Film / Animation

• 🌕 Blender
• 🌕 Dragonframe
• 🌕 Olive Editor
• 🌕 DaVinci Resolve
• 🌕 DJV Viewer
• 🌕 MPV
• 🌕 ffmpeg
• 🌕 ImageMagick

Minor caveat: Resolve works acceptably on Linux, but requires some work to get installed. It also depends on an Nvidia GPU, which pretty much limits you to Ubuntu/Debian, but given that Blender also basically requires Nvidia silicon¹, it's not like I wasn't headed in that direction anyway.

Music / Audio

• 🌕 Reaper
• 🌕 Musescore
• 🌗 Focusrite Scarlett interface
• 🌗 MIDI controllers
• 🌑 Spitfire Audio Plugins
• 🌑 Valhalla Plugins
• 🌑 FabFilter Plugins

For the Scarlett: class-compliance gives perfectly acceptable, standard functionality but control software/drivers are unavailable.

MIDI controllers are an interesting one. I tend to avoid any driver-heavy or onboard computer/screen-style keyboards (looking at you Native Instruments) due to their inherent planned obsolescence and vendor-lock. I currently use an Arturia Minilab 3 to play into Reaper, which has configurable MIDI channel outputs on knobs and faders.

Both the Scarlett and Arturia control softwares are simple utilities that flash your defined configuration to the hardware, which then persists indefinitely in onboard memory. This means they're the basic definition of usable on Linux, but you might need another machine to set up the hardware in the first place, hence the half-moon. In both cases, I've set my hardware to a single preset configuration, so while this isn't an issue for me, it might be for others.

Spitfire, Valhalla and FabFilter plugins lack any official support. There are some moderate success stories involving Wine or LinVst. I haven't investigated any of this myself yet because I value my sanity.

I've been looking, more recently, at vendors who are actively supporting Linux, notably Tracktion, with a very nice suite of FX plugins and classic synth emulators.

Writing

• 🌕 Sublime Text
• 🌕 Meander

Development

• 🌕 Sublime Merge
• 🌕 Spindle
• 🌑 RAD Debugger
• 🌑 RemedyBG

It seems like Ryan Fleury wants to eventually bring the RAD Debugger to more than just Windows, but right now it just lives there. Remedy is unlikely to ever fly the coop.

Games

• 🌕 Steam

For Steam, I believe my entire library is playable natively or at least has moderate support via Proton. One or two sacrifices would be acceptable.

Utility

• 🌕 Resilio Sync
• 🌕 Tailscale
• 🌗 Backblaze

Backblaze's very generous fixed price² backup service does not extend to Linux users, which is really annoying. It's unfair to totally fail them, because you can still back up your machine to their servers, you'll just pay a regular market rate for S3-style storage instead of their magic loss-leader number for Windows and Mac users.

State of the Union

If you only do some of the stuff I've mentioned software for above, you might be able to switch tomorrow. It's been this way for years, with the primary holdouts being pro audio, music and — for some reason — image editing and design. And no, GIMP and Inkscape aren't competent alternatives, no matter how much you want them to be. Inkscape doesn't even support CMYK and its interface is a jittery mess.

It seems like, for now, the solution is still to run a second computer alongside a beefier Linux desktop. This might look like a Windows VM inside of Linux, a second Windows machine or even a Mac.

If going for a dual setup, given the state of the modern laptop market, it seems like the right solution would be a MacBook of some description running alongside a Linux tower — the former's efficiency and idle battery usage making it ideal to be the portable side of your rig, while notoriously bad-at-being-portable Linux can happily sip from the wall in a desktop format.

I'm in a fortunate position currently where I have an older, second-hand M1 iMac, which means I'm technically in a position to switch right now, but I'm loath to hitch my horse to Apple's cart again so quickly. The other barrier is is that I'll have to find another backup solution, or make the iMac the primary owner of my drives, which means expensive external enclosures. While Macs are also far, far better at handling large volumes of data than Windows, the inability to just crack it open and add any old drive you'd like is really grating.

1. Blender doesn't depend on Nvidia directly, but it does perform at its very best on their hardware. AMD and Apple Silicon GPUs, despite a lot of active work from Blender, are still lagging behind. ↩
2. They do like to increase it semi-regularly, but also I am fully aware that they lose money on me specifically. Even though a $40 hike stings, it's still the cheapest remote backup on the market. ↩