2024 will be the year I finally be the year I ditch windows.
I am not exactly new to linux, yet I am far from an expert. I made my journey over the years form trying Ubuntu (many many major revisions ago) and have found myself down the rabbit hole of going Arch. I run Arch with KDE on my laptop. I want to fully ditch Windows on my desktop, however I feel this will be a much bigger hurdle to overcome.
Build Specs: i7-12700KF Copper Modded EVGA RTX 3090 64gb of 3600mhz DDR4 ASUS Tuf Z690 Wifi D4
I could go into more detail about my specs, but the specs aren’t what has made this journey a bit tougher. I use a Line 6 Helix and a Line 6 PowerCab 112+ and both have usb connections to my computer for integration with, you guessed it; windows or mac software only. Now I don’t have a problem running wine, and a number of other solutions to run windows programs, I do however have a gap in knowledge in order to try to use these specific programs with specific USB peripherals.
Now, I am not sure if this is the best way, but I had heard the idea of USB passthrough. And I have no clue where to begin with that. Would this be the direction I should be going for programs such as those?
The only other software that I am going to struggle replacing is the RGB lighting software for all of my hardware. Most of it is corsair (Fans, RAM, Water Cooler, and plugins for the asus motherboard.) And my Steeleseries keyboard which uses GG.
I have looked into using OpenRGB but I was unable to figure out how to get those setup as it wasn’t as plug and play as the manufacturer software, but understandably of course.
The absolute biggest hurdles is my Nvidia problem. I have always had issues with Nvidia on Arch. I would gladly take an suggestion. For reference, I would be using this mainly for my gaming. I occasionally dabble in Stable Diffusion.
I will be running Arch with KDE preferably, but every single time I have had issues.
I suppose any feedback anyone may have would be helpful.
Checklist of things I need to get working on in Arch, any help would be welcomed:
- Helix Guitar pedal and PowerCab 112+ (USB Passthrough or any other alternatives people may suggest)
- RGB for SteeleSeries Apex Pro (GG software on windows, open to alternatives)
- RGB for Corsair (iQue on windows, open to alternatives)
- Nvidia Drivers
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Use VirtualBox to make a Windows VM and you pick the USB devices from the menu to connect them on the fly, or you can configure the VM to pass them in by default.
That might be the route I go.
I believe that both VirtualBox and KVM (QEMU) can do USB passthrough. With either one you can have the full Windows OS running on your Linux desktop, which could be more comfortable than going for WINE. Here’s an example with KVM and Arch Linux.
Thank you for the suggestion! I will look into this.
KVM has been my go-to for many years of running servers because it is extremely lightweight. Like for example, last year I finally ditched the old poweredge 860 servers (very early 2000’s machines which topped out with a dual-core CPU and 8GB of memory), however from these servers I was running half a dozen virtual linux boxes handling websites and email. Of course running a Windows vm is going to take a lot more resources but any desktop computer that is less than a decade old would easily handle it while still managing your regular linux desktop.
One caveat about KVM, however, is that there’s not really a great GUI interface for it. There IS a monitor to manage the VMs you have up and running, but I always launch new VMs from the command line, which is pretty much just a matter of setting the name and memory, pointing it to an existing image file or ISO, and then using the GUI monitor to launch a VNC remote connection to handle getting a new OS installed or make changes to an existing image to get it on the network. I don’t consider this a burden, but then again I grew up on the command line.
I haven’t explored KVM as an option. Yet, but I am going to be investigating that for my own use case now.
Outside of my laptop and desktop, I did run a Dell PowerEdge (forget the model, but I have a singular Xeon and 64gb of ram in it along with hardware based raid and 8 hdd bays.) that I ran Ubuntu on, but I realized Ubuntu wasn’t the way to go for me due a number of things. So I shut the server down and will be reinstalling another OS on, I haven’t decided yet but maybe Fedora for that. It was just being used to run Docker and Portainer, which I had a good chunk of docker containers running. I had a reverse proxy, Jellyfin, Gluetun, uptime kuma, signal messaging bot for uptime kuma to let me know if a services went down, photoprism, kanboard, a wiki, and a few other services.
I used to run Ubuntu on my servers but abandoned it because it was so unreliable. Things like a “security” update that completely broke the network card drivers, or another one that caused NFS connections to reboot the machine under a heavy load. I switched over to Debian at that point and have never had any problems in the past decade. Since so many people run Arch, I’m guessing it is similarly stable and will be a good choice for you (at least I think you said you were running it in your OP?). I’ll have to look through those services you mentioned, I haven’t heard of most of them.
Well for my poweredge server I ran Ubuntu on it, and my pis Raspbian. As far as desktop/laptop I use Arch, not for stability though it has been stable for my use case but more so for a bleeding edge up to date experience.
As far as the services I ran, they were for media consumption, and some other network tools.
You can passthrough your Rtx 3090 into Qemu to achieve hardware acceleration. With software called ‘Looking Glass’ you’ll get a hardware accelerated Qemu/kvm window instead of sacrificing your second monitor or using a kvm switch.
Level1Linux has made a brilliant videos about Looking Glass.
You should also passthrough a ssd/nvme disk into your Qemu.
Thank you so much for the suggestionsm I absolutely will be investigating this.
Year of the Linux desktop LFG!
Been using Arch with KDE on my Lenovo Yoga, both Wayland and X11 depending 9n what I want to accomplish. Though it lead me down the rabbit hole of Weston so that I could run Waydroid from within X11. Ultimately I just decided Wayland basically when I am not using my touchpad or when I want to run Waydroid.
Year of the Linux desktop, LFG!
For some reason, when I switch to X11 (also on Arch with KDE), it bugs out, so I’ve been using Wayland with xwayland bridge installed.
What was it doing for you when you switched back to x11?
It’s okay to dual-boot, or have independent systems. Just a suggestion, to consider.
I have 3 daily driven rigs. A MacBook for work, a Linux laptop for most things personal, and a Windows PC for gaming. Everything serves a purpose and specific use case.
A man after my own heart.
I had a whole bunch of machines and I just realised I haven’t booted Windows on any of them for a couple of weeks. I daily drive Tumbleweed when I don’t need any advanced Adobe features or play games that run on Windows only.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say I will ditch Windows completely, but it is nice to have options.
Funny enough, last time I tried to do the whole 2 systems, I had Arch (with GRUB) on one nvme, and windows 11 on another nvme. At some point, all drives were unbootable. I am lucky I had my important data backed up, and on a separate drive anyways.
I had thought about it, but I really want to ditch anything windows.
Check out OpenRGB to see if it meets your lighting needs. I use it with Corsair Commander Pro, keyboard, mousepad, RAM, QL fans and the ASUS RGB header and attached lighting. It’s been working great on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for me.
Totally agree. OpenRGB works for me.
Granted, I just turn the “GeForce” light on the GPU off, along with all the other RGB stuff inside the case, but it works. 😁
That’s what I might end up doing. I don’t care as much about the RGB on it as I do functionality. As long as they can go off, I have zero issue with that.
OpenRGB seems to be consensus on how to handle this.
I feel that Nvidia drivers in Linux will always be a pain and it’s straight up Nvidias fault.
I love the remarks Linus made about Nvidia.
Hopefully the recent Nouveau work and NVK can allow us to just get rid of the need for the proprietary driver.
One can only hope. That is the route I would prefer. But we shall see if it is practical for me!
With Linux, Nvidia wasn’t always bad as far as support goes. Now though, yes, I would agree this is an Nvidia issus for me.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=BcxKINWMD8M
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
They were a pain 20 years ago and they’re a pain now.
I have an ASUS m/b, Corsair fans (via a Commander Pro), and Razer mouse/keyboard and all the RGB is controlled with OpenRGB. It works okay but if my computer goes to sleep the RGB settings need to be reapplied… there might be a workaround for this, it’s one of those minor problems that I will get around to one day. OpenRGB recognised all the devices without any help and it was really easy to set up.
All the best for the switch!
I’ve also had pretty good luck with OpenRGB and some SteelSeries stuff (though my needs are simple).
If I happen to find a fix, or work around for that issue mentioned I will reach out. I did have Arch running on this machine once, but I didn’t tinker with OpenRGB for my lighting at that point.
I have (finally, and thanks to this little chat) finally got around to researching this! I couldn’t find any plugins, although, there are many great ones people have made: https://openrgb.org/plugins.html But it does look like the solution is going to be running a cron (job scheduler) script: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Cron
Thank you for sharing. I will be looking 8nto this for myself and my setup when I am back to my desk.
For Corsair - I’ve been very happy with ckb-next. https://github.com/ckb-next/ckb-next
It is pretty robust, allows remapping of key/button bindings, changing of RGB, DPI, etc. Their goal is to replace iCUE. Very robust for mice and keyboards, but they also list other hardware that it is known to work with in their wiki. Might be worth a look.
Thank you, I will chexk this out
I have to keep a Windows install around for the sole purpose of pushing firmware updates to my Headrush pedal board. The installer will run on Linux with Wine, but it cannot detect the pedalboard through the USB connection.
Try giving this a try. I found it suggested in the Arch wiki to update the bios. It’s basically a bootable Windows environment from a USB. You can then try running your firmware updates through it. It worked to update my bios so I assume it should easily work with updating firmware for other devices.
That’s an interesting idea. I will give that a shot next time!
I didn’t try it (because I didn’t have the need for it yet) but maybe https://wiki.winehq.org/Hardware#USB could help.
I hadn’t come across this when I was trying to get it to work with Wine. This looks promising - I’ll give it a try next time!
RGB for Corsair (iQue on windows, open to alternatives)
What I do with my Commander is to use the onboard lighting and fan curves. Set it up on a VM or when you still have Windows.
You can also look into Liquidctl
If all you need is to control RGB, I’ve been satisfied with OpenRGB. OP is saying he’s running Arch, and OpenRGB was quite recently moved from the AUR to the extra repos. The relevant package is
openrgb.When I get Arch up and running I will be checking this out.
I may do a VM as I have to find a way to utilize my specialized music gear. I do have to say thank you for pointing me in the direction of Liquidctl though, I want to consider that.
Use whatever you are comfortable with and works for you. At the moment it sounds like Windows might be the path of least resistance. Fine, go with that.
For me, I finally ditched Windows altogether around 15 years ago. Well, I say ditched - my customers and staff … haven’t.
The list of stuff you have problems with might be tricky on Linux simply because the vendors of music gear are unlikely to give a shit. Nvidia should be fine. I have a VMware VM at home which runs Zoneminder on Ubuntu, with a passed through Nvidia GPU. Surely it should be easier on physical hardware. I wrote this: https://wiki.zoneminder.com/GPU_passthrough_in_VMWare
You mention gaming so you’ll probably not be bothered with CUDA. You’ll need https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA If that doesn’t do it for you, hit the Arch forums …
The forums can be a bit intimidating but if you keep your query concise and show some evidence of effort, someone will probably get you over the line.
I definitely appreciate your response. I truly want to ditch windows, it would be easy without my music hardware though a VM with USB passthrough may be the ticket. The issues I had with Arch and my 3090 were really with trying to go the wayland route. Though that was over a year ago I gave that a shot. I could try again, but since then I have gotten more familiarized with running arch on other systems. I have tried many other distros, and none quite catch me quite like arch.
For my server I have already ditched windows, and went with a ubuntu server. Though I will be changing distros to something else due to differences in opinion with the way Ubuntu and Canonical conduct themselves. I would still rather see people use Ubuntu over windows, but that’s not much of a bar to pass.
I may eventually check the forums if this time doesn’t pan out with using arch on my main rig.
The logical replacement for Ubuntu is probably Debian. I have quite a lot of Ubuntu servers at work. I am quite seriously considering going upstream. I do like the LTS to LTS promise and that fits well for my customers who like to see enterprisey features without going RedHat or Oracle. You may not have had to deal with “enterprise grade” stuff which loosely translates to bloody expensive and often horrible.
I’m an Arch fan too - actually I’m a Linux fan. I used to do Gentoo (10+ years) but I got tired of my lap overheating. Before that Slackware, Mandrake (Mandriva), RH, Yggdrassil oh and a fair bit of SuSE, not to mention everything Novell did since NetWare 3.1. Whoops, sorry, mind wandering 8)
Wayland and Pipewire will probably do everything eventually but for now, you have functionality gaps. Pipewire is quite amazing and being developed at nearly indecent haste. It might be worth diving in to their community. At worst you will find a lot of like minded people to you.
I haven’t exactly decided on what distro for my server, but I have used forks/offshoots of debian, namely Raspbian or Raspberry Pi OS for my Pis. I understand the hurdles and such that come along with enterprise related products, as I am an IT professional by trade. I haven’t worked with RHEL or Oracle’s offerings yet.
I love Arch, but I too love linux. I never got into Gentoo, but I wanted to try it out just for the experience. I do get annoyed with having to compile everything from source with Arch on my laptop for exactly that reason; lap overheating. I also haven’t used Slackware, Mandrak/Mandriva, Tggdrassil, or SuSE but I have at least heard of them. And I absolutely love the conversation, mind wandering is alright by me!
The tough pill to swallow with linux for me has been the functionality gaps between different offerings, but I love the choices I am given.
I appreciate your time in responding!
I would wait for the cold months to pass. You’ll be paying more for heating, but if you play it right you can save on air conditioning this summer.
Why do you say that? I already run this rig with windows, it’s just a matter of ditching microsoft as a whole.
Hopefully it’s all a relatively painless & bug-free experience for ya.
Does your gear work with Guitarix?
U til you mentioned Guitarix I wasn’t even familiar with that software. Unfortunately I don’t believe there is any connectivity between PowerCab or my Helix with guitarix. But Guitarix could still be handy to me. Thank you!
The absolute biggest hurdles is my Nvidia problem. I have always had issues with Nvidia on Arch. I would gladly take an suggestion.
Ouch. Buy Radeon.
Next time I build a PC I likely will just out of the necessity for consistent driver support in linux. Though AMD cards in windows have always given me lesser results.
