ghaydn

On my new laptop, I wanted to try something less “Cannonical”-y too, after many years of using Ubuntu. I already used Manjaro KDE on my desktop and I kinda liked it. So that, I decided to install Arch and maybe copy some configs from Manjaro, if needed. Well, at first glance, it was awesome. Fast, fully configurable system, that is fully mine. Alas, that euphoria didn’t last long: very soon some fundamental problems occured. Here I should specify that I’m using my laptop for live musical performance. And I focus on some specific things that other users might not need to.

1. Wine - couldn’t make it work with 32bit apps and VST plugins. That’s really important to me, because some of those don’t have any native replacements. Whatever I tried, Wine just refused to create a 32bit prefix.
2. At some point, several (lots of) important LV2 plugins stopped showing their GUIs. They kept working in “generic GUI” mode, but for things like equalizers having a good visualization is crucial.
3. KDE+pipewire+wayland is the worst setup for live performance ever. When you move your mouse around taskbar, it creates video-streams (to draw thumbnails) that make audio graph massively crackle.
4. Really bad performance with several soundcards. SOme cards just refused to work together in one graph, turning the sound into the ocean of xruns. And that possibility of several soundcards was the reason why wanted to switch from JACK to pipewire in the first place.
5. No possibility to have pipewire-jack and pipewire-jack-client packages installed simultaneously.
6. LADISH and Claudia - they’re quite tricky obsolete pieces of software that I use. These are really handy for making large complicated audio systems. Alternatively I tried raysession, but it didn’t work well too (didn’t restore connections).

This list could have been longer, but I will probably stop here. After a month of struggling I switched back to Ubuntu Mate 24.04. And what can I say… It works fine. It’s a bit tougher than Arch, but not much; and at the end - not a single issue of listed above. And Ubuntu has custom lowlatency kernel that helps with realtime audio applications. And it’s still Linux after all - I can easily do whatever I want - like, uninstall Snap. Some packages are too old - that’s acceptable for an LTS release; if I need something up-to-date, I can just build it from source. Also I notice the same issues on my Manjaro desktop, but it’s not so crucial there, as I primarily use desktop for gaming and video montage. But still, considering to return to Ubuntu on it too.

What I want to say is that maybe Ubuntu is not so bad, really. Cutting off some unneeded things can turn it into a good OS.