lol dual boo

Audition, Photoshop and Cubase you’ll probably have the hardest time to truly replace. Even more if you rely on third party plugins for either of those.

Ok so I’ll just focus on dual booting since there are other thorough replys here.

I really recommend that you DO dual boot but only in a specific way.

When people say “Dual Boot”, this can mean two very different things.

A common way to dual boot is to have windows and Linux exist on the same drive by partitioning the drive and installing a boot manager. I strongly advise against this. It’s not worth the risk and pain.

Just install linux on a totally new drive and select it as the boot drive from bios. Leave you windows drive untouched.

Linux is much better than it ever has been. There is a very good chance it can do everything you want. But, especially as someone running a business, there will be times when you just need to get something done and will want to fall back to what you know. These times often lead to people giving up and rolling back to windows in a panic.

Just leave yourself a way to instantly and effortlessly fall back into windows as needed and eventually you will end up doing that less and less. Until you don’t do it at all and the windows drive gets wiped for more Linux storage.

I don’t have a Behringer UV1 but I do have an UMC404HD and an UMC202HD. Both work flawlessly on Linux out of the box.

“This PC is basically my life” screams leave well enough alone. I wouldn’t even set up a dual boot on a machine I depended on to make my living. If you do, make sure you’ve got everything backed up before you start. Nothing should go wrong, but that’s a very different statement than nothing will go wrong.

If you want to start using linux I’d recommend you buy a cheap second computer and start there. You can safely experiment as much as you like without risking your professional set up.

There is software for all your uses on linux, but I would start by using those apps on your current setup to get used to the workflow.

Changing from windows to linux can be really tough but it can be made a lot easier if you are already using programs that work on linux before you switch.

I can confirm focusrite scarlet interfaces work fine, and the uv1 should be fine as well but I don’t have one. You may need to get familiar with the Linux audio landscape. VSTs mostly work these days, although I only use foss VSTs so maybe commercial ones have their own caveats.

For pro audio you should be using JACK to connect your sound devices. These days if you run a system that uses pipewire, pipewire can pretend to be a JACK server just fine. I like to use QJackCtl to set up Jack environments, although its not necessary because many DAWs are capable of setting up in the application.

For a DAW I used to love Ardour, now I still like it but am sad that it has been crashing often for me. I don’t use any of them but there are some well liked Linux daws like reaper.

You may have trouble with recording without a preemptable (aka real-time) kernel. Afaict this only matters on lower end computers or when you have a lot of live plugins running, but using a kernel with this feature just means that more kernel code can be interrupted to handle things like fresh audio data arriving over USB.

Mostly, you’ll need some time to get everything working how you want. I agree with the recommendation to use a separate disk in your existing computer for Linux, or get a whole separate computer. The nice thing about using a separate disk is you can know for sure your windows setup is available if needed. For me I slowly left windows behind, only realizing later that it has been a year or more since I last fired it up.

I suggest having two separate hard drives rather than dual booting

1. There is no shame in dual booting. That will give you the freedom to find alternatives for everything in your workflow until you stop needing to boot into Windows at all. The preferred way is with a separate physical drive, because windows updates will sometimes overwrite the ESP partition or do other weird things which could break your Linux install.

2. Not an expert in that, sorry. There are plenty of articles online for alternatives for all of those.

3. Linux has no trouble reading NTFS. I have an NTFS network drive, and on my dual boot laptop I can simply reach into the NTFS partition on my second drive and grab files from it from Linux (Windows cannot read the Linux drive, though).

4. Not sure on those specific models, but I have a Behringer UM2 and Linux detects and works with it just fine.

1. Yup.

2. I use Audacity because it’s super simple and has a familiar interface. Ardour is a DAW with way more features and mixing available, but a lot of people just use ONE as well for the “one and done” method. VSTs are going to be hit or miss depending on what they do and how they were written (many are windows-specific), but there are other things available for replacement if needed. Link.

3. NTFS is fine to read from on Linux, but I wouldn’t suggest read/write because NTFS will 100% corrupt itself over time. Stick to either read-only from NTFS and save elsewhere, or copy them to a new destination and work from there.

4. There’s a lot of info on these on Linux. Sounds like support for the Scarlett hit with kernel 6.8, so you’ll be fine there. The Behringer EV1 should be standalone hardware, meaning it does it’s work with the PC.

You can just run a LiveUSB of Fedora or whatever and try all this stuff out to be sure with no commitment. You could also get a second drive cheap and make this easier to test out fully if you really want and make the switch from dual booting a lot safer.

Either way, you have easy options to test all this out before even installing.

I would dual boot first. I’m doing that myself at the moment with Pop OS. I disconnected my existing drives leaving just the drive I’d install Linux to. Ran the installer, then reconnected. I hit f12 at boot to select startup. I did this to avoid dealing with grub or messing with the windows bootloader. I haven’t had good experiences with it in the past.

My biggest problem with trying Linux at the moment is I have a USB audio mixer that Linux refuses to enable. I can tell it sees it, it just won’t list it as a selectable audio device or send audio through to it. So I have no sound.

Actually the safest thing is probably to choose a main system and run the other in a VM like with VirtualBox. For you, you could just install VirtualBox on Windows then Linux inside of a VirtualBox VM. Windows does have a builtin Virtualization solution too you may be able to use, but I have personally never done that. Keep in mind too that VMs are not as performant as bare metal. For video probably NO, for images fine, for audio maybe but you’ll have to see if you get the real-time timing you need in a VM. Good way to play in any case. 2nd best if you have a workstation, not a laptop, you could put in a hot mount SATA drive enclosure, and just swap in the drive you want and get full bear metal performance. Dual boot takes some tech skill. Be sure to back everything up if you do that. Should do that anyway before fiddling. Also if you use bitlocker and secure boot make sure you have all your recovery keys and know how to work with your bios settings too.

Maybe I am missing something, not sure why you care about NTFS. If this is a separate computer you don’t really care about that, just the sharing protocol (SMB for example). If it is on the main box, then you’d probably convert this to Ext4 or something similar. No reason to stick with NTFS with Linux. There are a lot of great FS options on linux plus BTRFS, LVM, or RAID to if you want redundancy.

Regarding apps. The alternativeto site is great. Linux has a bunch of audio and photo software. If your a pro, you may not find any of it sufficient. Especially a lot of people cannot do without Photoshop. The common quoted photo programs are GIMP and Darktable. There are many other photo and image programs. Common audio program is Audacity. Again, there are many others. Looks like some handle vst but I have no personal experience.

1. Definitely dual boot, especially if you’re new to linux, and double-especially if this is what you use for work. You are likely to run into situations where shit just doesn’t work and you need a fallback environment to operate in while you figure out what that’s about and how to fix it. Likewise, you will run into software that runs badly on linux or just doesn’t run at all even under wine/VM, and it will be nice to have that fallback for when you don’t have time to fuck around and figure out what the problem is and need to just get shit done. If things go well you will find very quickly that you don’t need it and can probably go ahead and delete it after a little bit, but at first you want that lifeboat. Mine stuck around for 2 weeks, but I only even used it the first couple days and the rest was ‘maybe I’ll run into some weird situation…’ and just not needing it. As for merging the partitions and such, I believe that’s possible, but you definitely want to make sure you have backups before you try it just in case. There are many good cloud backup services that have linux native clients (I use filen.io myself.)

2. I’ve never even touched music software so I have no idea what’s out there. I do however know about a great website called alternativeto.net that lets you find alternatives to existing software, and you can select your platform to limit it only to linux software. For example, here’s the entry for linux-native replacements for Cubase (it was the obscure one from my perspective, wanted to see if they actually had anything, turns out they do.)

3. Yes, NTFS generally works mostly fine on linux, though there are a couple of weird cases where it causes problems (one I ran into was adding games I had installed on an NTFS drive for windows to Steam on linux, it was very wonky.) After nuking my windows boot drive I went through and copied all the stuff off my NTFS drives and reformatted them to btrfs before putting the data back on them to ensure that everything would work smoothly, but if you’re just using it for regular file access you should be fine. The one caveat I would add is I would probably not recommend editing large projects in files on NTFS drives in linux if you can avoid it, but poke around google and see if you can find people reporting issues with your specific software/use-case to see if there are any problems with it.

4. Drivers for weird hardware are potentially an issue. Looks like there is a FOSS driver for the Scarlett, didn’t see anything at first glance for the Behringer, but also again I have no idea what I’m looking at here so this is something you’re going to have to do some research on. I have had some weirdness with audio in general on linux, things cutting out unexpectedly, stuff like that, but that’s strictly games/discord/that sort of thing, so it might be worth looking for stuff other people have posted about doing heavy audio work on linux to get an idea for what to expect. I’m sure it can be made to work, but it might require more fiddling than you expect.

Either way, welcome to the party. :)

Quick response:

1. Yes, what you suggest is possible, but just be careful to backup your data. Burn the Gparted ISO onto a USB and then boot from it. You will then be able to use this tool to delete the Win partition and resize the Linux one. For complete peace of mind in case something goes wrong, I suggest using CloneZilla to create an image of the drive for backup purposes before messing around with the partition. Of course, you will then need a spare internal or external drive of the same size, or larger, onto which you will save the image… Grub will easily cope when the Windows partition is removed, but I also suggest installing Refind, which provides a nice interface at boot-time to choose which system to use and also recognizes any changes when partitions are added or removed. You should find the package in the repositories of most distros.

2. I cannot help with this.

3. Linux can handle NTFS. On my Linux server I used Samba to share files on NTFS drives over the network because those drives were removed from my Windows PC at the time . Most Linux distros will handle Samba shares through the CIFS-utils package. I read that there is no great performance loss between sharing Linux’s EXT file system over a NFS network share from a Linux box , and NTFS over a Samba network share from a Linux box, but there is one potential issue as I see it: Linux distros do not have the tools to check NTFS drives for errors. Therefore, if a powercut was to happen, then you may then have to remove the NTFS drives from your Linux machine and go find a Windows machine to check the disks and correct any errors. I coped with this for a few years before deciding to create new EXT4 partitions and copy the data across from the NTFS partitions. I recommend that you employ a similar migration strategy.

4. I cannot help with this.

Good luck! The learning curve is steep and somewhat mindblowing, but very satisfying too - and you’ll maybe catch the Linux server admin bug (disease?) and want to go deeper into that rabbit hole…

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.