What OS Should I Install?

[Jud]

I've got a third of a TB sitting here unused in my desktop. I currently have Windows 10 and Xubuntu running on it. I also have Catalina running on an old MacBook Pro laptop.

 

So what should I install in the empty space to play around with? I used and liked FreeBSD in the past, but stopped when I got into computer audio because it doesn't have enough users to have the latest audio drivers made for it. I'm not averse to peering around "under the hood" of an OS (using the command line/shell) - in fact I occasionally enjoy it a lot - though as I get older, I find myself tending toward convenience a little more.

 

Shouldn't be so GUI-oriented I can't play around a little, but I don't want to spend all my time with CLI either.  And must have up-to-date audio drivers.

 

Suggestions?

[Jud]

I was on Distrowatch myself and had a look at Manjaro, elementary and Mint as candidates. Might be Manjaro since I'm already running an Ubuntu variant, but nothing says I can't try them all.

 

Also, thanks for the suggestion, but Raspbian and variants are no go because there's no reason to be running a stripped down ARM-oriented OS on a desktop with an Intel 8700K CPU that sends music to my system wirelessly in another room via UPnP/DLNA. Apologies for not clarifying a bit more about my computer and audio system.

 

 

[Jud]

2 hours ago, Cebolla said:

 

Assuming that's 'all' it'll be doing audio wise, ie, simply running a UPnP/DLNA media server to provide the audio files wirelessly over the network to the UPnP/DLNA renderer in another room (so not actually involved decoding and playing any audio files) - why do you require up to date audio drivers and the like?

 

Very good question, and there is an answer.

 

I run several players - Audirvana, HQPlayer, the Qobuz app - and various other apps to help me rip, download, convert (to AIFF), supply metadata for and back up music files to two external HDDs and the cloud (Backblaze). I not only send these files wirelessly to the main system, but play them locally, sometimes converted to DSD512, sometimes sent without sample rate conversion, in my small office system.

 

I also run a server on my OSs (Subsonic) that sends my local files via Internet at full resolution to my iPhone so I can play them while traveling or on my hour long daily walk.

 

And I'm further curious about playing with additional music utilities.

 

So while that's what the desktop does vis-a-vis the main system, that's not all I ask it to do.

[Jud]

3 hours ago, gmgraves said:

I use an old MacBook Pro for Tidal, Amazon Music and Quobuzas well as for Some Internet radio (especially when I want I want to record Internet radio, such as the Proms). I run OSX 10.11.6 El Capitan (the highest the hardware will support) and everything works fine. The nice thing is that with the Mac laptop, I can control it using my iPad  and a software solution called Remote Pro. It works through WiFi as long as the Mac and the iPad are on the same network and with it I can use my finger on the iPad as a mouse, scroll up and down and right to left, use the tablet’s virtual keyboard, launch apps, etc. With a Digital video to HDMI cable, I can view the laptop from my easy chair on my big-screen TV. Works great, I recommend it. also, being a Mac, drivers aren’t needed foe DACs, etc.

 

Hi George -

 

There are remote desktops for Windows and Linux also. My favorite that works on Windows, Mac and Linux is RealVNC. Just really a well made and easy to use product. And of course there's the old reliable Windows Remote Desktop, various other VNC and remote desktop apps, as well as some cool phone apps that let you remotely SSH into your computer.

 

It isn't that Macs don't need a (USB) DAC driver, it's that it's built into the operating system. Same with both Linux and Windows these days. But as I noted above, the MacOS driver won't let you do native DSD, only DoP, so I'm not happy about that.

 

Edit: By the way, I have a mid-2009 MacBook Pro on which I'm running Catalina, which the hardware doesn't officially support. There are a couple of websites that provide means to do this. It runs nicely. The main reason I bothered to install the newer OS version is that apps I use will likely start to drop support for El Cap soon.

[Jud]

2 hours ago, gmgraves said:

my MacBook Pro is from Mid 2008 and El Cap is the highest it will support. If you know of a way to put a later OS on it, please let me know of the URL, I’d like to do that, you can send me a private message if you like. Thanks in advance.

 

http://dosdude1.com/catalina/

 

You know to make a backup before trying this.

[Jud]

I tried Manjaro and elementary. I couldn't get Manjaro to use as its default my preferred web browser, Vivaldi (for some reason Manjaro threw an error every time I tried to start Vivaldi as the Manjaro default web browser - it started and worked fine from the Internet apps menu), and my pacman-fu isn't sufficient to install the no longer supported package Subsonic. (Subsonic serves local audio files over the Web, allowing remote access to full resolution Redbook and hi res.) Manjaro uses a fork, Airsonic, instead, which I had tried before Subsonic, but gave up on because I couldn't quite get the hang of configuring it properly.

 

So, on to elementary. This distro has lots of UI ideas I like (e.g., it uses a dock that intelligently gets out of the way when app screens are maximized), and it incorporates Flatpak, which allows various apps such as Qobuz to be installed easily. But it's not a finished product. Apps often failed to launch, and shutdown and restart from the menu never worked. Qobuz launched but would never play sound.

 

Thus I'm on to Linux Mint, which is easy and familiar for me to work with because it's Ubuntu 18.04 dressed up in a very slightly different UI. I'm even using the XFCE version, which is the version of Ubuntu 19.10 I'm running (Xubuntu). Vivaldi, HQPlayer and Qobuz are all installed and working fine. I'll get around to installing Subsonic. But it does kinda feel like I'm running two virtually identical OSs. I'm probably wishing for the impossible, wanting a distro different enough to be interesting but with an easy learning curve that will allow me to install and run all my desired apps.