Older desktops can have a somewhat hefty idle power draw due to the overall system consumption contributing more than expected, such as the southbridge. According to this old review of the i7-2600k, the system idles at 74w, which at $0.12 per KWh, would cost you roughly $77 per year. Though you might want to confirm that with a Kill-a-watt meter if you can (libraries sometimes lend them out), since I’m pretty sure that total system power chart includes a discrete GPU, so the real number for a GPU-less system is probably around 40 or 50w at idle.

If that is accurate, you could potentially replace your i7-2600 with a used Dell Wyse 5070 thin client from ebay for about $40 (in the US), and that idles at 5w, which would only cost you $5 a year at the same rate.

Older thin clients and laptops tend to have much better idle power draws compared to desktops. For other people reading this, if you’re using a desktop for a low-power use case, it’s probably worth finding out what its idle power consumption is and doing the calculation to determine if it’d be worth replacing it with a more efficient used thin-client or office mini-pc.

I suspect a VM would introduce latency (big no no for music production), and I can’t imagine getting ASIO working would be easy (though I’ve never tried it).

According to WineHQ, Ableton’s compatibility with wine isn’t stellar. FL Studio works quite well in it, but switching DAWs can be a pretty major undertaking.

For Linux native DAWs, Reaper and Bitwig are the two best options. Reaper is the most affordable at 60 bucks, with an infinite free trial.

OP, as someone who has a very similarly specced laptop:

Install Linux Mint, do a one click install of the Nvidia driver with the mint GUI driver installer, and then open the application that’s stuttering from your start menu by right clicking on it, and select ‘run with discrete GPU’, which will force it to use your Nvidia card.

Mint has access to newer nvidia drivers than mint, and Cinnamon let’s you open programs with exclusively the Nvidia GPU instead of integrated graphics from the start menu.

Do not follow this advice OP. Never install the drivers manually from Nvidia unless you’re an expert and have a very specific reason to go this route.

With Mint, just use the driver manager app and you’ll be good.

They are not. You have to install the proprietary driver from the GUI driver installer app with 2 clicks.

GIMP with the PhotoGIMP overhaul and Resynthasizer plugin (content aware fill) is pretty darn solid. Not perfect, but a massive upgrade from stock gimp.

Just want to chime in that a Krita developer has been working on a complete text tool overhaul from the ground up for the past 5 years or so, and it is just about ready to be pushed into the beta versions, so that pain point should be resolved soon, thankfully.

Nvm

Obligatory Documentary of that event, including interview with LiMux sysadmin that exposes the back alley deals with Microsoft in Germany.

??? Snap support is completely removed in mint by default.

LibreOffice is very good, and generally its Microsoft Office compatibility is decent. If you ever find it’s causing problems, OnlyOffice is known to have better compatibility overall.

You can also try either of them on your Windows PC to see how she likes them, since they are available on all platforms.

The spat with the OBS devs was due to a fedora package maintainer refusing to package OBS with an older library for their own Fedora Flatpak repo, despite the newer library causing severe breakage with OBS (which is why the OBS devs held it back in the flathub release).

The Qt foundation tried to get fucky once already, and KDE and some other major companies that rely on it were about ready to fork it if they persisted. Qt seemed to calm down after that.

Not a great relationship to be in though, constantly suspecting that your toolkit might do a rugpull at some point if the shareholders demand it. But I think they could pull off a fork if they ever did.

Hm, death could be interpreted in a number of ways.

Does Almalinux’s 10 year support represent death by being unchanging, stagnation?

Or should it mean a distro that is on death’s door, with less and less developers working on it each year? Solus, Mageia and OpenMandriva might qualify there.

Void Linux seems fitting from the name alone, though otherwise doesn’t really go with the theme.

Just want to mention DavinciBox, which makes installing Davinci on any distro a pretty seamless and hands-off affair.

Personally I’d recommend Linux Mint, as you’re likely to have a very positive experience with it.

Fedora hasn’t been all roses for my particular setup either, since they fully dropped X11 in the latest version, but my hardware combo isn’t viable yet with Wayland, ultimately making me land on Linux Mint (which has been pretty dang nice).

I also tried OpenSUSE slowroll before trying Fedora, which I love the concept of, but an update on that seemed to bork my system (second monitor would remain blank upon booting), which made me a bit skeptical of its claims of extra stability over normal Tumbleweed.

I haven’t experienced any friction from DNF, so personally I don’t see it as a con. I just think Fedora has a useful middle ground between new packages and stability.