Hey there Linux community. I’ve been interested in Linux lately and have been considering switching to Linux Mint from windows 11. My main pc is a Surface Laptop Studio with an intel i7, 32g ram, 1 terabyte ssd, and an rtx 3050 ti gpu. I’m thinking about trying out dual booting to see how I like it, but I have some questions.
I use my laptop for a lot of creative work, video editing, web design, music production, photography, etc. I’m not too worried about it because I’ve come across many promising FOSS alternatives, but there’s some software I’d like to ask about specifically. I ditched Adobe Premiere in favor of Davinci Resolve a while ago and I know that there’s a native Linux version of Resolve, and I’m just curious about how well that runs for the people that use it?
As far as music production goes I’m an avid user of Ableton Live. It’s been my go to for years and I know that support for it on Linux isn’t the best, if it’s even there at all. I’ve seen a few people claim they’ve gotten it working but it seems a little suspicious to me. So to anyone in the music space, what are the best Linux supported alternatives? Or, in the event I decide to switch, should I maintain my dual boot setup to just stick with Ableton?
I’m also pretty locked into the Microsoft ecosystem with OneDrive (I get a terabyte of cloud storage for free so it’s where almost all of my files are). I’m in the process of trying to setup my own cloud storage with nextcloud or something similar, but until then I’m curious if I’d be able to set up OneDrive live file syncing in my Linux environment, similar to how it works on windows? If anyone has any experience with that I’d love to hear some input.
Not something that’s absolutely necessary, but I’m just curious if the touch support of my laptop would be maintained. Since it’s a surface device it’s actually a really nice touch screen, and the pen input is great, my wife borrows it for digital drawing sometimes and loves it. I don’t use it all the time but I do occasionally and it’d be a huge plus if it still worked just as well.
I think those are pretty much the only things holding me back from fully dedicating myself to switching, so I’d really appreciate some input. Thanks!
Davinci Resolve works just fine for me on Linux, and if you've got an Nvidia card and install the proprietary drivers it should be fine too. The Only caveat is that the free version of DR on Linux can't work with H.264 or H.265 encoded files. It can ingest AV1 encoded files, but, at least my install of DR 19 doesn't show an option to export AV1, only codecs like DNxHR or ProRes or Cineform. As long as you're not in a real time crunch or anything, you may have to allocate time in your workflow to do a separate file conversion after exporting from DR with ffmpeg or Handbrake or something if you need either of those.
Here is the list of supported codecs for DR 19. They only list Rocky Linux as officially supported, but it works just fine for me on Fedora Linux, and the installer doesn't seem to be specific to any type of package manager. (For anyone reading this with an AMD card, if you install rocm-opencl, DR will work with that, even though they only talk about Nvidia and CUDA)
As for OneDrive, there's a tool called rclone that can be used to, among other things, mount cloud storage services as folders. I think it was kinda broken for OneDrive a while ago (or MS broke support for it, im not sure lol), but you could look into that. I never really used OneDrive much, so I can't speak much about my experience with it.