Hi All! I'm basserino!
Welcome Basserino!
I have a desktop with 4th gen i7/16GB RAM, and 10th gen i5/32GB RAM laptop; I normally run Pop or Zorin OS on the desktop and on the laptop up to now I've been running Bazzite on
As far as my experience goes, if you are going to use the computer (almost) exclusively for music, then go with AV Linux, everything is already set up for you, and the maintainer/creator is active here.
Otherwise pretty much any distro will do—you may have to do a little extra set-up, depending on your needs. I would always recommend well known distros, with active forums and such, over some niche-solution, if you need to get help (i.e. Debian, Fedora, Arch, and maybe derivatives).
I have an FocusRite 18i8 2nd gen and an M-Audio Fast Track. I've did a little googling on "the Linux way" but some people opt for Jack, others opt for pipewire, and I've been hoping some users can share their own processes for getting to work. What do I know about Pipewire? Mostly that when running games periodically on desktop I get little moments where the audio will cut out. On Laptop this seems to be less of a case.
AFAIK the Focusrite are class-compliant, meaning they just work in GNU/Linux. For the Scarlett family there is also an interface for the internal mixer/routing, otherwise not accessible. Search this forum for it.
If you don't need to connect different hardware devices, or use at the same time different audio-software, you don't need jack or pipewire at all, you just use ALSA directly.
HTH,
Piergi
Statistics: Posted by Piergi — Sun Jul 06, 2025 12:38 pm