Eugenia

Most of my laptops are 1366x768. In fact, in a recent KDE survey, the developers got extremely surprised about how prevalent low resolutions were (it was linked around a few months ago). All developers are out of touch a bit, however, let’s not forget that this issue wouldn’t exist if Linux users weren’t allergic to anonymous data-sending with statistics like these. Yes, no one likes privacy invasion and telemetry, but statistics like these are needed by developers.

BTW, on Gnome you can use the ALT button to move windows around when they don’t fit. Still annoying though. Mint has 2 such windows too (their login prefs, and their panel settings pref).

I use Mint with Cinnamon with the Cinnamenu menu (instead of the default ugly one). I’m able to make Mint to start up at 700 MB of RAM. On my fast desktop I have Debian Testing with Gnome 47, that one starts at 1.5 GB of RAM. I’m thinking of using Mint there too.

Because LMDE runs on Debian, you won’t have the extra fixes for audio that ubuntustudio offers (mint runs on the same repos as all ubuntu flavors). Also, LMDE is debian, and their packages are older.

Regarding ram, reaper uses way, way less ram than any other daw, because it’s the most optimized of all. The creator of it, who also did winamp back in the day, is known for his optimization black magic.

Not the case with all laptops, e.g. some asus ones, and not even the tuxedo ones that require drivers.

Laptops from over 5 years ago are well supported by Linux (for the most part). However, the very modern laptops have bits and pieces that aren’t supported, from fan profiles, to the new intel webcams etc. They will run Linux, but you might fry them if your fans don’t work properly. So your best bet would be to get either an old one (I got a Macbook Air from 2015 with 8GB RAM, works great), or get a Tuxedo, or a System76 one, or a couple more Linux-specific ones. And it’s not because suddenly Linux does worse job supporting hardware, but it’s because these machines are. getting more complex and they need drivers for every little thing. Back in the day, things were more generic (e.g. the fans) and worked with a single driver.

With 4 GB of RAM you will be limited, so either XFce or Mint are your best bet (and edit their StartUp pref panel to disable some services – that will save you 200 MB of RAM). I wouldn’t put Gnome on a machine with 4 GB of RAM, it’ll start swapping before long.

Not sure why you say that “ubuntu studio is absolutely not an option”. You don’t give any reason why it’s not an option. Ubuntu studio has special scripts to make things like jack2 work in pipewire correctly, for one. I couldn’t get Presonus StudioOne to get any sound on my Mint installation without that ubuntu studio setup script, for example.

Reaper is nothing like Ableton, it’s its own thing, and you’ll need to get used to it. Ardour is another option, Bitwig, and some others I mention here: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/113358203445896735

LMMS is mostly for electronic/midi music (the UI is like FL Studio’s). For recording, you’ll need to download their .appimage dev-build (they implemented it a few months ago). Still no vst3 support in it though.

And you’ll need to get a supported audio interface, you can’t judge audio quality via BT.

Personally, I’d go for Linux Mint and do these things: 1. Install a theme that pleases you visually, 2. Edit startup sessions to not load useless things (I’ve even turned off bluetooth) 3. Uninstall fwupd (you don’t need that on a mac), 4. Uninstall the evolution-data-server 5. install the ubuntustudio pipewire config script, 6. install the daw you like, and use the pipewire connection kit to make sure you get sound out of it.

On my Mint, I’ve been able to get it down to 700 MB of RAM on a clean boot (out of 1.3 GB by default). That gives some headroom to do better web browsing or media work.

I do the same for my friends and family, installing linux for them while their laptops only have 2 or 4 gb of ram. XFce with debian on slow hardware, mint on 4 gb laptops with medium speed. However, for something really low end, do consider Haiku, as I wrote earlier.

With that little ram, you’re better off with jwm, lxqt, lxde, or icewm. Not xfce or mate, that require over 600-800 MB of ram just to start up. In fact, with so low ram, you’re better off with something like Haiku.

Linux Mint, because I don’t like to tinker with the system, I like good defaults (and Mints has them).

I don’t like flatpaks. Some builds don’t support printing, for example. Same for snaps. That’s why I always prefer appimage from these types of binaries, but my favorite always remains the repo versions.

Gimp 3 is scheduled to be released in May, around the time that Debian 13 is about to come out. Given that Gimp is never on time, and that Debian will only include stable software in their repo, you won’t see Gimp 3.x on Debian for another 2.5 years (the next major release).

However, don’t fret. There’s a way to run Gimp 3, even now, without overwriting the 2.10.x version of Gimp that comes with Debian: https://github.com/ivan-hc/GIMP-appimage/releases That’s how I run gimp 3 on my Debian too, I just download the 3.0-rc1 .appimage file, make it executable, and it’s up and running.