Noo

Fruity Loops doesn’t have any easy equivalent on Linux. I’d say try reaper and ardour as they provide windows binaries. Be careful LMMS isn’t a FL clone, it’s midi only.

For the Arturia plugins you can install them with wine and use yabridge to make them compatible if they are not in vst compatible format (ardour can take vst2 and vst3 but sometimes it will not work). You can also have a dedicated PC for instruments (it is what I do) on windows (using audio gridder). Gotta test the Linux server version of audio gridder to see if I can go back to linux on m’y second PC. Or you can just send the midi notes to pc2 then get the audio out to pc1.

It’s doable to make proprietary plugins run on Linux but the reliability is the nightmarish part, as an update can break the wine compatibility and it can take a few mins/hours to restore.

It’s a real issue because, technical aspect aside, lots of instruments cost a lot of money and are necessary to keep up with the trend. Also theses plugins can save you a lot of time, meaning you can provide more music on short time (effect plugins are concern as well here).

As a professional music composer myself and working on Linux with Ardour, I’d say it is overall pretty good since many years. If you don’t like midi in Ardour you can use another soft to runs midi notes. On Linux the good thing is that if you don’t like something you can change, specially with audio softwares.

To me the two major issues with professional music on Linux are :

• Proprietary plugins for virtual instruments are a nightmare (hard to make them to work, expensive on machine’s resources and unreliable),

• Most company still think free software = unprofessional/amateur, which can make it harder to get jobs.

Debian/ubuntu got binaries in their repository.

So it could take some time to teach her.

It isn’t because he needs to be willing to teach in the first place. If a person don’t want to teach autonomy to another, the debate ends here.

But to know if you want to take the time to teach someone, you have to consider the possibility in the first place not thinking ‘impossible’ then move along.

Also we can debate on how to teach a family member without being overwhelmed, because it is a real topic of discussion.

She might want to, who knows?

She wants privacy, maybe she’s not afraid of learning new things to get it. It is possible.

Sad that people with the knowledge won’t even consider the great opportunity it is to teach that knowledge to a family member.

You should setup a yunohost server for her.

But you should be upfront about being a teacher for her not being a helper.

For the others in the topic, yes teaching people to be autonomous with the digital is a lot of work (and a lot of phone calls), but it’s also really rewarding for both you and “the student”.

Yunohost.

Default is garbage for me interface wise (weird app menu/panel made for touchpad not desktop), so I prefer Lubuntu or Xubuntu.

Kubuntu is… Well it’s KDE.

Back up your data before hand.

You can use gparted on your mint live session to resize the windows partition to minimal size, leaving the biggest empty space possible. Leave 500mo to the windows partition as a safety net.

Then during the install process :

• choose manual install (not install on a full drive),
• create an ext4 partition for the system (30 to 50 go) with a “/” mount point. It’s the system partition.
• create a “swap” partition (size = your computer ram x 2). It’s the physical memory partition.
• last create an ext4 partition (all remaining space) with a “/home” mount point. It’s the personal data partition.

Once the install completed you will be able to access your windows data from mint.

Try puppy linux ?