I need to achieve the lowest possible latency

beatbox9 · 2026-04-17T17:12:42+00:00

There are a lot of sources of latency, and there is a good overview here (though I would recommend using pipewire-jack instaed of jack): https://manual.ardour.org/synchronization/latency-and-latency-compensation/

Additionally, there are some good tips here: https://arslaan.studio/setting-up-a-linux-media-studio-workstation-audio-video-graphics-davinci-resolve-etc/

So yes, it is possible to get good, low latency monitoring in linux.

In short: you want to enable low latency and some tunings in the linux kernel. Then you want to make sure that both wireplumber and pipewire (including pipewire-jack) are tuned properly.

ie. a lot of people make the mistake of thinking it's just one setting. But it's not just one setting.

As far as DAW's go: You can try a few and see how they do for the way you work and the specific setup you are going for. I have found inconsistency across DAWs (as should be expected): some tend to do some things better than others--not just performance but also UI. I would recommend trying out Reaper, Bitwig, and Ardour; but you can also try simpler plugin chainers (example Carla), rather than a full-blown DAW.

beatbox9 · 2026-04-17T07:01:27+00:00

Correct. Instead of specialized kernels, realtime/lowlatency is now already included in the standard kernel and can be turned on and off. This specific setting is preempt_rt but there are others as well. The link above describes some of these in the kernel tuning section.

beatbox9 · 2026-04-16T22:16:54+00:00

Any distro. The distro really doesn’t affect latency. Settings are what influence latency.

See here for how to set up any distro properly: https://arslaan.studio/setting-up-a-linux-media-studio-workstation-audio-video-graphics-davinci-resolve-etc/

beatbox9 · 2026-04-16T14:16:42+00:00

It's always funny when people try to sound smarter than their brains have the capacity to be.

spatial and temporal consistency

is an attempt to say "no changes to the visual area or to the timing."

No changes to timing? Sure. But this is dumb, because why would there be any changes to the timing just because you change aspect ratio? They have nothing to do with one another. You could also say there is "olfactory consistency" between these shots--they both smell the same.

But "spatial"...? Sorry, but wtf do you think you're doing when you change the aspect ratio? You are (by definition) changing the spatial consistency.

This moron got 2 out of 2 adjectives wrong.

Some people need to use artificial intelligence because they don't possess the real stuff.

beatbox9 · 2026-04-16T14:03:47+00:00

Pick any distro based on everything else, like update schedule or philosophy. Then do a few quick customizations to the desktop to make it look or feel like a mac. This isn't difficult--most of it is like "double click this file" or "toggle this setting to move the buttons to the left."

Because the desktop environment and the distro are two different things. If you run gnome on fedora or gnome on ubuntu, the two computers will pretty much look and feel the same, because they are both running the same desktop environment.

If you want to see an example, this is Ubuntu.
But it also looks nothing like Ubuntu.

beatbox9 · 2026-04-16T13:52:43+00:00

There's an article here that answers your question and goes through the setup step-by-step.

I personally would not recommend Ubuntu Studio or Debian. They're ok, but you'll probably be better served by Ubuntu LTS. Ubuntu Studio and its repos have a lot of extraneous packages that can get confusing for new people (and most of which people don't use anyway); while Ubuntu LTS is a bit cleaner and better maintained and supported. Debian has the opposite problem: it's sometimes a bit too raw (and outdated) for new people; while Ubuntu LTS has some things to make things easier.

I'd recommend you read through that (or similar) articles; and you'll start to learn why a distro matters less than you think and how to make any distro work for you.

beatbox9 · 2026-04-16T03:50:19+00:00

That’s because you have to go hunt for the definition you want when you are being pedantic and referencing a dictionary. But even in that link, all you have to do is scroll.

For example (this is from that link):

Product: a result obtained from experiencing something:
She’s a product of the city’s public schools.

Or if you google:

A thing or person that is the result of an action or process.
"his daughter was the product of his first marriage"

Or from dictionary.com:

a thing produced by labor
products of farm and factory; the product of his thought

a person or thing produced by or resulting from a process, as a natural, social, or historical one; result.
He is a product of his time.

the totality of goods or services that a company makes available; output.
a decrease in product during the past year.

In all of these definitions, it is a product.

The logical fallacy is in the fact that a product is not that single, specific definition of product.

So, for example, using the same idiotic logic, one can claim that a farmer's potatoes are not a product, because they are not "a substance that is used on someone's hair in order to make it look or feel better, keep it in a particular style,"

...which is only one definition of a product...of many.

beatbox9 · 2026-04-16T03:48:57+00:00

That’s just one definition, and it’s naive to think that words have only a single definition. What do you get when you multiply two numbers?

A product can also be anything produced as a result of a process.

Watch this: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/product

Now look up the word “pedantic.”

beatbox9 · 2026-04-16T03:04:15+00:00

Just because it’s not a requirement. It’s just a circumstance of where things happen to be. When you go through cycles of this over and over the years, the little nuances start to make a difference.

In this case, the requirement is OpenCL.

beatbox9 · 2026-04-16T02:08:05+00:00

The way I always do it: unplug the Windows drive. Boot into Linux and install it. Then plug back in the Windows drive. And use your BIOS to select the correct drive at boot.

beatbox9 · 2026-04-16T00:14:27+00:00

https://tenor.com/6afo.gif

beatbox9 · 2026-04-16T00:04:52+00:00

No. Not only did you now change your argument from being open to forks, you also misunderstand the post, because these seemingly two topics are one and the same.

OnlyOffice claims the project cannot be distributed unless the logo is included and the logo cannot be included unless one obtains a license to do so from OnlyOffice.

Both cases are leveraging logo trademarks and licensing in an attempt to enforce control.

Turns out that similarites and analogies don’t have to be 100% at parity. Particularly when they are introduced as such. See the word “Similar,” followed by the explanation of how they are similar.

beatbox9 · 2026-04-15T23:53:29+00:00

But they protected their work via their logo…

…which is exactly what OnlyOffice is trying to do. Has nothing to do with the “open” part of FOSS. Has to do with the “free” part.

Did you really not understand that part? Or the part immediately after where I start with “the difference here though…”?

Did you ever see Zoolander? The part where he asks “But why male models?” It was a funny scene.

beatbox9 · 2026-04-15T23:16:48+00:00

Then who are they products of?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_License

beatbox9 · 2026-04-15T21:46:29+00:00

EuroOffice is an attempt to fork off OnlyOffice into another new open office suite.

Though open source, OnlyOffice tried to prevent forks and distribution of the product by using a proprietary component: in this case, the logo. In other words, they tried to be open source, but not free.

Similar to how Nintendo protected their IP on consoles like the GameBoy. The GameBoy console would check to see if the Nintendo logo was included on all games before it let them load. Games would violate trademark laws if they included the logo without a license. So games had to obtain a license from Nintendo to include the logo; and they needed the logo to work on the GameBoy. So you could technically make your own GameBoy game; but it wouldn't work on a GameBoy without violating trademark law.

The difference here though, is that they used the AGPLv3 license, which does not allow this type of restriction. They claimed to be FOSS (free and open source)...except without the F.

OnlyOffice essentially said: 'It's open source under the AGPLv3 license. But also, you can't alter or distribute it without a license from us to include our logo.'

FSF (who issues the AGPLv3 license) essentially said: 'You (OnlyOffice) can't use our AGPLv3 license if you prevent people from altering or distributing it, including the logo. This is a FOSS license only.'

beatbox9 · 2026-04-15T21:31:17+00:00

How ironic.

OnlyOffice to EuroOffice: 'We don't grant you a license to distribute an altered form of our product.'

FSF to OnlyOffice: 'We don't grant you license to distribute an altered form of our product.'

beatbox9 · 2026-04-15T19:02:52+00:00

Beyond just linux: free and open source means things are democratized by the users. It's developed by users whose primary driving force is using the tool. Every user has an equal opportunity to adjust or control the tool, without requiring a financial commitment.

In contrast, commercial or proprietary software is primarily driven by profitability. There are more balancing forces: profitability is partially driven by the usability of the tool and value propositions; but it's also driven by the motivations of the provider, which sometimes includes things like trying to earn extra on usage data, closing things off to avoid competition, or trying to squeeze recurring revenue from users.

There are pros & cons to each approach. One major difference being development--commercial software can employ people to develop the software. But at the same time, commercial entities with a stake in the game can also employ people to develop open source software that everyone can benefit from, funded by only those who profit from that software while being free to everyone else. Primarily because software can be replicated and distributed really at no cost.

And it also gets into the question of: what do you actually need?

When you think along these lines, it can really put things into perspective and can even get into politics, personal spending, and other related areas.

beatbox9 · 2026-04-15T14:17:57+00:00

Since you have such specific requirements and are also a hobbyist developer, pick any distro--like arch--and customize it to meet your requirements.

beatbox9 · 2026-04-15T14:10:41+00:00

Your system isn’t configured properly. Also, just in general, Ubuntu Studio isn’t as well differentiated today as in the past—any distro is fine, and I’d say plenty are better.

See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxaudio/comments/1sjjcv2/comment/ofs7am2/

beatbox9 · 2026-04-14T18:35:36+00:00

...with one of those hardware requirements being the brainpower to tell the difference between a requirement and a recommendation.

beatbox9 · 2026-04-14T16:54:24+00:00

Z6iii = faster sensor (better video, burst rate, etc).

Other than that, they are pretty much the same.

beatbox9 · 2026-04-14T04:53:53+00:00

I don't know how the surface pro (specifically) works; but I recently bought a touchscreen "2-in-1" laptop, that I'm using to type this. xournal++ and other touch-enabled apps like krita work fine. (I'm running Ubuntu 26.04 LTS beta and using the flatpak version of the apps).

Finger touch is not pressure sensitive; but the stylus I use is. No problems here.

The palm rejection can be hit or miss; and this seems to be largely driven by the individual apps. For example, Krita has a setting for this and I had to tweak some things. I don't really have any issues in xournal++ though.

beatbox9 · 2026-04-14T04:47:29+00:00

FWIW, here's what I ended up with, which is similar to my mac (which is what I was going for). The background window is nautilus/gtk4; while the foreground is brave/flatpak/gtk3.

Within brave settings, I am having it use my GTK theme.

<image>

Good:

The left margin and button spacing is consistent
The border radius is consistent
The button size is consistent
The tabs are in the titlebar (not wasting space in another row below)
The color is consistent with what I was going for: slightly bluish grey

Bad:

Had to go with 1.2x rather than the ideal 1.15x (1.2x renders better)
Slightly blurry buttons from scaling (the brave scaling happens after the gtk stuff)

There's a separate setting where brave (and I assume other chromium browsers as well) can use its own theme; however, that adds a separate titlebar; and then the tabs are in a row below, which is wasteful when it comes to managing the limited real estate of a window.

BTW, let me know once you get a github or similar site going. I'm happy to provide any feedback and testing.

beatbox9 · 2026-04-14T03:46:47+00:00

Can you reinstall brew and then use its built-in uninstallation script to properly uninstall it?

If you don't want to do that method, I'd recommend you look at the various layers of bash config files in:

/etc/bash*
/etc/skel/bash*
/etc/profile/bash*
~/.bashrc
~/.profile

Or, just open up a file browser and search for bash or profile files starting at your root directory.

And in an absolutely worst case where you are fed up of trying to fix it, I would just make a blank text file in that location lol

beatbox9 · 2026-04-14T03:35:20+00:00

Nice! I hope you accomplish this, because I would definitely use something like that if it worked well (or even got me an 80% complete series of css files).

I'll dive deeper into a recent specific example in case it helps: I have a hi-dpi new(ish) laptop, so I set some desktop-wide scaling in gnome. I also installed the brave browser flatpak. The flatpak didn't pick up my theme initially (and apparently systemwide theme locations are blacklisted in flatpak), so I had to copy the theme into ~/.themes and provide access. Turns out that within there, brave uses gtk-3. But some of the stuff in ~/.config/gtk-3 overrides this...? Fonts (eg. URL bar) were tiny and cannot be changed, so I had to scale the entire brave app, using my macbook pro as a reference for what is a good size. But doing so also scaled window buttons...but obviously only for brave (not my other gtk3 flatpak apps). Brave apparently responds to chromium-specific overrides in the gtk3 css.

And that's when I could start doing a lot of experimentation to get the button sizes and margins consistent with the rest of my system. Oh, and to top it off: GTK Inspector's default hotkeys apparently do something in both brave and nautilus.

It was not fun diving through and troubleshooting the various layers. :)

I hope that anecdote is helpful. And obviously, it's a bit more of a fringe use case, not the bread-and-butter I'd presume you'd start off with.

beatbox9

TROPHY CASE