Yeah there is just so much choice now with Linux audio, all of those above are good for beginners. My son regularly uses Guitarix and hydrogen when he is working on something new, before the band get together with the real hardware. Ardour is a great introductory DAW that people can learn before they move on to something like Reaper or pro tools.
With the introduction of pipewire as well recently, the whole Alsa, jack, pulse nightmare is rapidly looking like a thing of the past.
Had almost the exact same experience with Ubuntu studio when setting it up for my son. Fantastically easy to install but ended up with just an overwhelming amount of ‘stuff’ there we really didn’t need.
Carla, Cadence, Audacity, Ardour, Guitarix, Hydrogen, Couple of VST synths to get you started and you have a basic studio that can be installed and ran on almost any Linux Distro.
Linux Mint with Cinnamon Desktop Environment, PoP Os with their Cosmic/gnome desktop environment, or Fedora workstation with KDE desktop environment. Pick one of those three and roll with it ;)
There are tonnes of reasons why these are good/bad choices but simply put. They are all very well documented (mint and Pop are Ubuntu based), Fedora has a very active and helpful community.
Cinnamon on mint and KDE on fedora are both very much like windows in the way they look and behave. PoP Os is a bit more Mac like with their desktop.
I personally use an Arch based distro (endeavour OS) but the three above are just much easier to sink your teeth into.
You could try Sandwine https://github.com/hartwork/sandwine not used personally but looks like it has enough restrictions built in.
Crossover is not really for Linux gaming. Sure it can run games, but it’s mainly focused on providing a stable environment to run commercial software applications. Think of it more as a LTS version of WINE for running adobe suite etc.
Sadly I’ve not got a rig to test it and report back, it’s all AMD linux rigs here and my old hardware steam link has been relegated to a drawer since I got my deck. Greenlight (Xbox series X) and chiaki (PS5) also suffer from the frame pacing issues you mentioned (just an FYI for anyone who may be interested).
Have you tried Limiting download speed in steam settings?. I followed a tip somewhere and set it to 10000000 (10gb/s) and it worked for me (I was having similar speed issues).
That’s good to know, my sons were interested in it, now we can all have a good gaming session together before they decide if they want to buy it. Sadly there is no PS5 cross play (although saves can be linked) so I am going to have to buy the PS5 version to play with friends. Still I don’t mind giving Larian some more money as the game is just fantastic, relatively bug free and even performs pretty well on the steam deck.
Hey Liam hope you are well and the site is going good. I used to follow your stuff religiously when I was over on Reddit.
Many steam deck users report that using moonlight as a client works great with nvidia hosts. It utilises nvidia gamestream protocol which is built into the nvidia drivers on Windows/Linux, basically removing the need to mess around with encoder settings.
Most mainstream distros will work with pretty much all of the software suggestions. I tend to avoid recommending Ubuntu these days as Canonical have some stubborn ideas regarding things (snaps should have been shelved long ago in favour of flatpack), that said, PoP-Os is an excellent choice for buntu based without the snaps.
Video,editing: shotcut is pretty good alongside Kdenlive. For anyone working with audio, Audacity is a definite must have for track/sample editing and effects. Whilst Ardour is an extremely capable DAW, there are others you might want to check out, LMMS is a nice sequencer (fruity loops) DAW for example. On the professional side there is Bitwig (never used it but heard good things about it) and my personal favourite Reaper.
The deck uses PDC?, basically it has a negotiated power draw. The charger is around 2-2.5Am(I can’t remember anything today), 45W and can range from 5-15 volts. I’ve had usb hubs with memory sticks/cards, keyboard, hdmi and external ssd all plugged in with zero issues, although if I use my usb-c extension cable I need to run it from the power cable to the hub and not the hub to the deck as things get very flakey configured with the second option.