doesn’t either of the loopback devices provide desktop audio?

this must be the flex-box that’s all the rage

it does the “same thing” but it’s the low-iq unga-bunga-caveman option which requires less configuration. Meaning you don’t get a boot menu to choose the os on boot.

if you want to be extra careful, just remove the ssd of the first os when installing the other on it’s ssd & insert back when done. then just in bios/uefi switch which storage device to boot from.

FWIW, I dualbooted for years fine with win10 and Arch - the trick is to keep them separated. let windows have it’s own ssd and linux it’s own, that way the darn windows don’t nuke other boot entries willynilly when notepad gets an update.

This approach needs 2 storage devices tho, and you switch which to boot from bios/uefi.

But on the upside, this makes no changes to either linux or windows, as both are on separate storage devices. Both have their own boot partitions. When you want to get rid of either, you can just remove partitions from the unwanted os’ ssd and make new ones.

Since gaming is the first priority, does he play competitive multiplayer games? Better check their anticheat state first, as some just flat out deny linux, full stop.

I have no real recommendation in regards of distro, but afaik either should do.

And what I gather, Bazzite has package management ‘ujust’ https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/ - but beyond this hastily googled doc, I have no idea, never used Bazzite.

Is SteamOS immutable though? I thought that was just Bazzite.

I don’t know of the version that’ll be available (when ever that happens), but on steamdeck it is.

ref. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS#Features (yea yea wikipedia and lack of citations…)

Version 3.0 still utilizes an immutable file system

at the end of the day, steamos is still linux which runs steam, just (AFAIK, and on steamdeck) immutable, which is probably not something you want on desktop (or you do, I’m not here to tell you how to computer).

Just the default steam/valve vendor decorations don’t make games run any better, imo.

I’d just keep to a regular distro for a general use pc.

edit: but, yea, I’ve seen people run eg. video editors etc on steamdeck, so it does work as a regular pc too, if you really want to.

apparently renoise doesn’t allow values less than 5ms… which also seems to work just fine, huh.

ASIO doesn’t seem to want to work, and it doesn’t do anything for me anyway, I’ve been more than kontent with the DirectSound (I have no idea what wine 9/10/11 does with it under the hood, plays fine through pipewire & my virtual devices) - and renoise isn’t really a traditional daw anyway, it can record instruments for sure, but it’s more of a old-skool tracker with vst/vsti and daw-like automation.

edit: “kontent”… my kde-isms peaking through. heh.

edit2: ffwiw: when I last used renoise on this same machine on win10, I absolutely could not have set the latency below 20ms, even a single instrument of any kind would immediately crackle.

I’ve set it to 16ms in renoise, not 100% how accurate that is but audio doesn’t crackle and jamming on vsti’s doesn’t seem to have noticeable input delay. I don’t have any actual instruments to test.

While I don’t specifically know about version 11 (EDIT: now I do!), but I’ve been running windows daw + vst’s on wine 9-10.?? for ages. Using Renoise + bunch of different vst’s (mix of vst2 and vst3), all of them seem to work just fine. I did have to install dxvk to the wineprefix to get the ui of some plugins to work, but they do work fine(ish) with it.

Now, the thing I have NOT tested is ilok drm. So far I’ve managed to do with plugins which don’t use it.

I see wine 11 is already in my distro’s testing repos. Aggressive waiting starts.

edit: for clarification, preset dropdown menu’s from one specific plugin vendor (solemntones) vst’s needs to be click/dragged the right way, otherwise they seem to not work. Bit annoying, but otherwise my plugins work.

edit: seems to work just as well on wine 11. But sample size = me & my vst/vsti’s.

Same.

I had been dualbooting between win10 and linux for quite some time, but at some point near the win10 EOL, I realized I had not booted to windows in ~8 months or so. Decided it was time to nuke the windows partitions.

Okular? Iirc it opens cbt and the likes fine.

I don’t think btop even records to any output file, it’s more of a “taskmanager with graphs” than a logging utility.

btop? it’s pretty customizable, if a bit too flashy (by default) to my liking. https://github.com/aristocratos/btop - should be available on repositories for most distros.

Defender is antimalware/antivirus. There at least used to be a separate firewall in windows, but not sure if it’s a part of defender or not.

Either way, “firewall” is traffic control, antimalware/virus is the execution guardian.

you can always add eg. a swap file later if needed - apparently not as good as a swap partition, but it is more flexible. With 48 GB of ram I hardly think you’re going to have issues, but that depends entirely on what do you do with the system.

Firewall isn’t really helping the system against you, it’s to block ousiders getting in - more or less.

install locations: if you just use what’s in mint’s repositories, you don’t really need to think about it. Out-of-repository stuff like steam games etc generally live in ~/.steam or so. Or in some dedicated path you configure in steam/whatever.

As for snap/flatpaks/whatever, haven’t used a single one. But in general: I’d favor the distribution’s repos, if at all possible for installs. If the app isn’t there, but is in snap… fine, I guess? As long as it’s managed by some kind of package manager for easy install/update/uninstall. But having to manually download and install from a website? Rather not, that’s when the maintenance becomes manual.

And of course, opinions are opionated. Your system, your rules. :P

good best debugger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

tldr; basically you explain your buggy code to the duck, and when you explain it, you suddenly realize what the issue is.

any inanimate or even imaginary object works, but rubber duck is the classic option.

Windows: repeated acts of footgun

Linux: …oooookay?

I used archinstall archsockbuy