To the surprise of absolutely no one, I’ve just about had my fill of evil multinational corporations and their draconian control over every aspect of our daily digital lives. Thing is, though, that’s normally a principled stance. But recently, it’s become a pressing problem that I have to resolve soon if I want to keep earning a living. Apple and Microsoft both seem dead set on making it nearly impossible to function without spending gobs of money I don’t have, and I’m responding in the only way I know how: outright revolt—by trying to make Linux work for me despite the fact that the open-source OS wasn’t designed to do a lot of the things I need it to do.
I’m getting ahead of myself, though. What am I on about here? First things first: as I type this, we’re just a little over two months away from Microsoft pulling the end-of-life switch on Windows 10, the desktop operating system I’ve been running since the day it came out. And I figured I’d run it pretty much forever, since Microsoft officials ranging from Jerry Nixon (at the Microsoft Ignite 2015 conference) to Pavel Yosifovich, Alex Ionescu, Mark E. Russinovich, and David A. Solomon (in Windows Internals Seventh Edition) confidently proclaimed Windows 10 to be the “last version of Windows,” further clarifying that, “There will not be an official ‘Windows 11’; instead, Windows Update (or another enterprise servicing model) will update the existing Windows 10 to a new version.”
Y’all probably know the rest of the story. Not only did Microsoft prove to be barefaced liars in that regard; the company also colluded with its hardware partners to add unnecessary security hardware requirements to Windows 11: something called TPM 2.0, which enables Secure Boot and disk encryption, and an artificial exclusion of sixth-generation-and-older Intel Core CPUs.
The company has its spin on this, of course, but just remember: any time anyone in authority tells you they’re doing anything “for your safety,” your rights are almost certainly being violated.
My PC is long in the tooth, granted, but still runs like a striped ape, and its CPU is more powerful than many officially supported by Windows 11. I do audio and video production with no problem at all. I’m a hardcore gamer, and although my machine won’t play the latest and greatest in 4K resolution with all the bells and whistles turned on, it’s a monster for 1080p gaming (especially since swapping out my power supply and upgrading my graphics card to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060), which I’m perfectly happy with.
So I’ve been eying the exit door for a while now, not wanting to run an unsupported OS but also not being able to afford a new desktop machine that meets Microsoft’s arbitrary specs. I could use registry hacks or jury-rigged installers to get around the arbitrary minimum requirements, but that would put me right back in the same boat—running an unsupported OS that Microsoft could take away from me at any time.
And then, in a turn of events that seems unrelated but plays right into where all of this is going, my old MacBook Pro recently crapped the bed right in the middle of a business trip to NYC. That hunk of junk has been unsupported for years now. The last OS upgrade Apple allowed me to apply to that thing was macOS High Sierra, back in 2017. But I only use it when I’m on the road, which isn’t super often. And, to be fair to Apple, there are legitimate reasons to limit its access to newer operating systems, since the hardware is a known quantity and can’t be upgraded, and to be frank, I never should have installed anything past OS X El Capitan on it. It never worked as well thereafter.
I wish we lived in a world where JFK’s butchering of the Chinese language was accurate and that their word for “crisis”—wēijī—did indeed translate into “danger + opportunity,” but that’s some typical Western ignorance. In this case, though, it’s apt. My dead MacBook Pro and my complete lack of interest in trying to even figure out how to create a disk image for OS X El Capitan proved to be the exact opportunity I’ve needed to test drive the open-source desktop OS I’ve been itching to try for years now: Linux.
If you’ve never looked into running Linux, it can be daunting to decide which distribution (distro) to even run. And that might require some explaining if you’re as much of a Linux newb as I was, like, two weeks ago. Linux isn’t simply the product of a corporation that you bop over to Best Buy or Walmart or Amazon to purchase. It’s a kernel on which hundreds of different operating systems have been built—some by for-profit companies, some by communities, some by solitary mad geniuses. Some Linux distros are made for supercomputers; some are made for servers and don’t even have a graphical user interface; and a lot of them are made for desktop computing.
There seem to be about 600 versions of Linux currently being actively developed. Some are for sale and come with robust tech support, some run different package managers, some come out with regular updates twice a year that promise long-term support and mainly rely on the community for tech support, and some are constantly being updated but aren’t supported for long. Every Linux user under the sun has his or her opinion about which distro is the best and why all the rest are garbage.
In normal circumstances, this would have prompted some serious analysis paralysis on my part. Being autistic, I find the unknown to be equal parts terrifying and tantalizing. And there are few things that cripple a person with autism more reliably than too many options.
In this case, though, I really didn’t have many viable options. If you’re trying to revive archaic x64-based computer hardware and you’re looking for a simple user interface that just makes sense, pretty much everyone worth listening to agrees that Linux Mint is the way to go. It’s updated twice a year, and each new update comes with four years of support, so if you download Mint 22.1 today, you can keep on enjoying security and driver updates and so forth until 2029, even if you decide not to upgrade to Mint 22.2, which should be out by the time you read this and is expected to enjoy continued support until the autumn of 2029.
It’s open source, so if the developers turn evil for whatever reason, the community can just take the existing code, create a fork, call it “Linux Pennyroyal” or some such, and keep on developing. Or I can just switch to one of a-gazillion-and-thirteen other distros optimized for narcissism-of-small-differences corner cases.
At any rate, the plan was to use Linux on that old MacBook mostly when I’m on the road, and all I really cared about was having a functioning word processor, access to the Google Chrome and Tor browsers, plus Discord and Signal apps, all of which were a cinch.
What I didn’t expect was to fall in love with Linux so quickly. I spent nearly 14 years fighting with some iteration of OS X / macOS and always found it to be a nonsensical operating system designed for people who hate computers. Apple only seems capable of making user interfaces for toddlers and insufferable hipsters—which, as it turns out, is everything I want in a mobile phone UI, but the exact opposite of what I want in a desktop environment.
Linux, though—especially Mint with Cinnamon—just makes sense. It took me about three days to wrap my brain around the OS, which made me want to use it more. It got me wondering whether this was the solution to my Windows problem. Could I convert entirely to Linux for day-to-day productivity and desktop entertainment?
I started dipping my toes into the lake of that idea after barely a week using Mint. I rely heavily on Microsoft Publisher to lay out and print my zine. So far, I’m finding Scribus to be a workable workaround, although it’s not nearly as polished and lacks some features that I’ve gotten used to, such as daisy-chaining text boxes across pages. I’ll also need to replace PaintShop Pro, which is my preferred graphics and photo editor and infuriatingly isn’t available on Linux. So far, GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) seems to be a barely workable alternative that’s going to require some serious retraining of my brain, which I hope I’m not too old for.
Long the bugbear of the operating system, gaming pretty much works out of the box now thanks to Valve’s stable release of the Proton compatibility layer, which is based on Wine and comes baked into the Linux Steam client. In fact, I’m getting better benchmarks playing No Man’s Sky on Mint Cinnamon than I do on Windows 10.
Of course, for any desktop environment to work for my purposes, I need access to my music. My go-to apps for desktop audio are BluOS Controller and Apple Music (no matter how much I may grumble about the latter). I also occasionally go straight to the Qobuz app, although more often than not, I stream Qobuz through BluOS.
This is where things started getting complicated, frankly. But I pushed through it. I found Cider, an open-source Apple Music client for Linux. But it turns out, the open-source version is janky and orphaned, and researching the new paid version, Cider 2, put me off the developers really quickly.
BluOS, it turns out, has been converted by the community, and I was able to install an AppImage from GitHub that got me up and running lickety-split. Qobuz was a quick no, unless I wanted to access it via the web player, which was also a quick no. I like a proper application, thank you very much.
What about Roon? I’ve fiddled with it a few times for various stories and always enjoyed it, but inevitably went back to my old ways and forgot about it. But Roon Server can be installed on Linux, although not quite in the easiest-to-install fashion. After a bit of learning about terminal commands, I got it up and running, no problem. Since it’s a headless install, I also downloaded the Roon app for iOS so I’d actually have, you know, a screen to interact with, and I loaded up some of my music on my now-Linux laptop and got to listening.
And for whatever reason—perhaps because I couldn’t fall back on old habits—I quickly fell in love, and I think I’ll continue using Roon even if I remain shackled to Windows for the time being, however temporarily. It’s just a really elegant solution that integrates my local and Qobuz libraries beautifully, and it pushes me one step closer to shutting down my Apple Music account (which I mostly keep around because it’s a family plan that also includes Apple TV+, which is the only video streaming service that’s still worth the money, in my opinion, so maybe not).
I will be happy when Roon finally releases a full desktop application for Linux, though. And it’s odd—it was in the process of typing that last sentence that I suddenly realized I was fully committed to making Linux work for me as more than just a travel OS picked to revive an ancient and unsupported old Apple laptop.
Music playback is one thing, mind you. What about audio production? Because let’s not forget that I spend as much time making audio as writing about it. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the DAW (digital audio workstation) I work in, Reaper, is distributed on Linux. And just a few days before I looked into this, the plugin company whose products I rely on most, ToneBoosters, released a beta installer for Linux. So that covered my compressor, multi-band compressor, headphone-correction system, bus, and reverb.
Sadly, though, the noise-reduction, de-reverb, de-click plugin I lean heavily on, Izotope RX, has not been officially adapted for Linux. And it turns out the plugin works just fine, but only the pirated version. The official installer and its DRM just don’t seem to work on Linux in any form, and the company seems to have no plans to make it so. And I refuse to run a pirated copy.
Izotope’s position is infuriatingly understandable, though. It’s difficult to know just how many people use the Linux desktop OS in its hundreds of forms, because most of the ways we have of estimating how many people use which operating system just don’t quite work for Linux. You can count the number of people who visit your website running a particular OS and treat that as a sort of informal poll. The US government does that. But Linux users are also way more likely to protect their identities online, so those numbers are hardly reliable.
Also, a lot of the recent uptick in Linux desktop adoption is coming from local and regional government agencies in Europe abandoning Windows, not because of the shenanigans surrounding Windows 11 but simply because they don’t want to have to rely on infrastructure provided by a corporation that’s a pillar of support for a fascist regime. That’s not my interpretation of things—it’s their own explanation for the change. It’s a concept called digital sovereignty. And the only reason I bring it up is to point out that increased Linux adoption as of late doesn’t mean it’s necessarily being used more for creative purposes or by private citizens.
Still, people who get comfortable with Linux at work or in public service must certainly be more comfortable adopting it at home, right? But if we’re playing it safe, we can say with reasonable confidence that Linux desktop distros are still used by fewer than 10 percent of desktop computer users and accept that as a reason why companies like Izotope and Apple and the like aren’t lining up to port their software to the open-source OS next month or anything.
But there’s reason to believe that the winds are blowing in that direction and that companies would do well to be ahead of that curve. People are fed up with Microsoft’s shenanigans, especially the fact that Windows 11 is a bloated mess, largely because it’s less a desktop operating system and more a gigantic piece of malware designed to turn its users into near-infinite monkeys typing on near-infinite keyboards, all in an effort to feed its greedy AI models with more training data.
Every Word document you write now, every email you send, everything you do in Windows 11 is a datum to be sold as a commodity in the Attention Economy or a pattern to be fed to a neural network. You are not Microsoft’s customer and Windows is not its product. You are its product, and its customers are the AI and hardware partners who want your data and/or your forced purchases.
And I’m simply not convinced the settings that seemingly allow you to turn that data mining off actually do anything. Nor am I convinced that Apple isn’t headed in the same direction. And I’m not alone in that sentiment, either, which has more and more people considering alternatives like Linux every day. Especially given that the most applicable ones are free. And especially given that Linux distros like Mint Cinnamon are as newb-friendly as any OS can be.
So I’m about to run a grand experiment to see if I can make this work. As I write this, it’s my turn to edit the next episode of Audio Unleashed, my podcast with former SoundStage! Solo editor and friend of the Network Brent Butterworth. If I can make it work without Izotope RX—mostly by building some manual FIR filters and doing some hands-on spectral editing—I’ll attempt to edit an episode of the SoundStage! Audiophile Podcast and see how that goes.
The latter is a much bigger test than the former. I edit only one episode of Audio Unleashed per month, and it typically takes me somewhere around six hours. Brent and I always record in the same places with the same equipment, allowing me to build FX chains that work pretty much every time with a little tweaking.
With the SoundStage! Audiophile Podcast, though, I produce at least two episodes per month, and every one of them is pure chaos, based on the fact that the guests are never the same, the equipment is never the same, and the locations are never the same. Hell, a recent episode featuring Axiom Audio president Ian Colquhoun was recorded on a boat in the middle of a freakin’ lake, for goodness’ sake.
Each episode can take 20 to 25 hours to turn around, with one recent episode taking a full 50 hours of grueling, hair-pulling work, including a marathon 26-hour session leading up to the final hours before release. And I would have had to scrap those recordings completely if it hadn’t been for Izotope RX’s de-clipping tools.
I’m not complaining; I’m merely giving context. If losing a key tool in my workflow means increasing my time invested by, say, 20 percent, I can eat that with Audio Unleashed, which I produce as a hobby on nights and weekends. Six hours versus seven and a half once a month is no big deal. Add 20 percent to the average production time of the SoundStage! ’cast, though, and I’ll run out of hours in the workweek really quick-like.
And honestly, even if I’m able to pull off an edit without significant additional time investment, I’m still for some reason hesitant to ditch Windows altogether. It is an anchor, and while that means it keeps me from moving forward, it also keeps me from becoming unmoored. (Remember, the squishy meat computer in my skull runs the Autism v.1972/74 operating system, which is probably not the one your brain is running, so my security blankets are more of a necessity than they may seem).
At any rate, I think the best solution for now is dual-booting Windows and Linux on my desktop PC and trying over time to spend more of the work week in the latter and less in the former, until my workflow in Linux is tight and tidy and until I can access whatever music I want whenever I want, cast to any device I want, without hiccups.
And before you old Linux heads @ me about it: no, I’m not just settling for my first Linux distro. I spent this past weekend “distro hopping,” as they call it—loading images of different flavors of Linux on a bootable flash drive to see which ones resonate with me. I think, when it comes down to it, I’m going to keep running Mint on my MacBook Pro because it’s a lean OS that has pumped new life into that aging hardware, and that’s all I need it for. It’s safe, boring, and predictable, and it just works.
When I do convert my desktop to dual-boot in the coming weeks, though—after my next check comes in and I can afford an extra solid-state hard drive—I think Pop!_OS NVIDIA Edition with the Cosmic desktop is the right working environment for me. It’s not as Windows-like as Mint, and it requires a bit more tweaking. But it seems to strike a nice balance between productivity, gaming, and media-playback needs, which resonates hard with me, and it just sort of fits how my brain works.
After that, it’s really just a matter of waiting for the audio world to catch up and start developing versions of their apps for Linux. Which, of course, will prompt more audio enthusiasts to ditch Windows or macOS, which will lead to more audio development on Linux, which will prompt even more audio enthusiasts to ditch Windows or macOS. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll look back at 2025 as the year in which open-source software built by and for the people became truly viable for more than just techy computer geeks.
Just know, though, that getting out ahead of this wave means I’m going to be developing some new biases in favor of audio companies that support Linux (when apropos) and against those who stubbornly snub it. And hey, as I’ve said before: all hi-fi journalists have biases. I’m just being clear about this one. So if you see me grumbling about a lack of a Flatpak (or even an AppImage) distribution of desktop apps for any new connected gear I review, and wonder why in the heck that’s applicable to you—well, it might not be. Yet. But I’m on yet another crusade now. So just do what my wife does, and humor me.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
