This PC is basically my life, I use it for work (freelance business), entertainment, and to self host a server so I’m hesitant. I have a handful of questions for now while I look into it more:

  1. I’d prefer not to dual boo, but it might be the safest way to start? If I dual boot, get used to Linux and (hopefully) get everything I need working, can I then go from dual boot to erasing the Windows partition and recombining so I then only have Linux installed and can keep the work and programs I already installed on Linux?

  2. I do voiceover work, music production, and digital art/photography. Anyone else here do all this and what programs would you recommened to replace Audition, Photoshop, and Cubase?

–2.1. Regarding music production, has anyone successfully used vst files from Windows on Linux?

  1. The drives for my server are NTFS. Does anyone have experience with this format on Linux (I use Emby)?

  2. My bread and butter right now is voice acting so I NEED everything to play nice. I’ve read there might be some issues with drivers for my hardware, namely Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 and Behringer UV1. Anyone have any experience with this?

EDIT: Wow that’s a lot of responses. I’d like to respond to each but I’m a bit overwhelmed with all the info haha. I think I’m gonna grab an old external USB drive and live boot from there and test things out. Thanks to everyone, I’ve got a tonne to mull over now. Appreciate it!

  • alexcleac@szmer.infoEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    I’d prefer not to dual boo, but it might be the safest way to start? If I dual boot, get used to Linux and (hopefully) get everything I need working, can I then go from dual boot to erasing the Windows partition and recombining so I then only have Linux installed and can keep the work and programs I already installed on Linux?

    My personal experience says: try dualbooting first, because it will make you to have a working machine continuously. Taking into account that all Linux-based OS behave vastly differently from MS Windows, it is possible to break things, when learning a new way of doing things.

    The drives for my server are NTFS. Does anyone have experience with this format on Linux (I use Emby)?

    I’ve been using an external NTFS drive for compatibility and big files storage: works as charm. The worst case scenario is you will need to install an ntfs-3g driver, although it is usually included with the distro.

    As for production: I don’t have much experience with that, although I can recommend you looking around tooling that solves the problem. You will need quite a bit of patience and trying things, because switching platform will definitely require you to make some shifts in usual processes you have now. Don’t expect things to be obvious 100% replacement: unfortunately lots of people have this expectation, and get frustrated.

    As for hardware, just looking the model up on the internet with adding “linux”, or “ubuntu”, or “fedora” should do the trick of figuring out if it will work.