So as mentioned in the last post, after who knows how many years I gave linux(Ubuntu) an honest try as a working adult.
And so far its not bad at all, there were obviously a couple of hiccups and some things that made stuff more and less better than my last home desktop environment, but as far as coming home from work and just wnting to work on side projects and maybe some freelance work. Nothing ever got in the way.
Game Devvin’ (Godot in my case)
For game dev; in the end I just couldn’t figure out the oculus link to godot thing. Honestly I think that’s fine. If anything, its better for me. I should have just known that making games for vr is extra slow for a beginner game developer.
I’ve made a small demo of walking through different areas of what is supposed to be zelda 2’s overworld. This has been an obsession apparently. For about a year or maybe two, this idea of remaking at least a chunk of the beginning part of the game after seeing this video. I’m putting the whole project to a rest for the moment. It’s a fan project and I’ll probably still be working on it, but in smaller doses.
But the break from vr is honestly a good one. Maybe i was starting to burnout from it or whatever, I think for the time being, until I get my chops with development all across the board, I’ll be sticking with flat screen game-makin’
Music stuff with ubuntu (or me being soft-introduced to the world of eurorack)
Essentially, I installed audacity and thats enough for my audio editing needs.
But I’ve been having a lot of fun sending midi over usb to my pc running vcv rack that receives the midi and spits out audio that is being input into my digitone which is mixed all up in there so i have an emulated modular playing alongside my digitone with (to me) no latency. now, this could obviously been done in windows or mac but the fact that i was setting up a synth in vcv rack playing alongside my hardware was pretty dang cool.
It honestly makes me want to repurpose an older pc into a headless vcvrack type project with a custom midi controller to basically have a modular system that can take midi in (even 5-pin if i really wanted to) or use a higher end single board computer to custom make a setup tailored just for that. but I digress.
Drawing (The thing that I didn’t have much hope for)
I guess I’m lucky that my random drawing display graphics tablet is somewhat supported by their company. My tablet is a bit on the older side now (a UGEE HK1650), and ugee the company has drivers for a newer version of their tablet on linux. After installation everything still seemed off, as in the pen moved the mouse but on the wrong screen, until I found a random forum post with some magic string of text that fixed it for me but with the huge caveat that my main monitor is can’t be on.
Yeah. Big bummer. So I can use my off-brand tablet but not at the same time as my wide ass LG display. Like stated, I should consider myself lucky I can even draw on it at all. Determined on using Ubuntu for a good while as my main driver and with the tablet technically working, I looked for a drawing app that would hopefully be hassle-free in setting up with the tablet. I found Krita and I really really like it. Like a whole lot.
It had a small learning curve with its UI but I’ve managed to find a workflow and I feel that the combination of nostalgia coming from my old drawing tablet and the novelty of this new app is making for a nice learning experience.
I just really like the brushes on Krita, something like this I would have to really play with in clip studio paint to get. I’m going to try to ride this novelty rush as much as I can and squeeze as many drawings out of it.
Random notes
Here are some random notes, stuff that I may not have a big opinion on but I do want to put out there.
Writing in firefox on wordpress is kind of weird. Feels like some stuff might not be up to date, but it doesn’t bother me that much so I didn’t investigate.
I play indie games mostly, Terraria, Starbound and the like, I have some tripleA-ish games in my library but honestly I haven’t bothered to install them as benchmarks but one thing I have noticed for sure. Starbound runs like an absolute dream on Ubuntu Steam. The same with Don’t Starve Together, just runs and loads so much smoother and faster. Those are the two main games I’ve played lately I guess but there’s definitely a difference in experiences.
Learn how to kill a process, it took me forever learning how to kill a crashed app through the terminal just to find out theres like a task manager equivalent right there on my startup dock.
I wanted to watch my favorite show, The Expanse, on amazon and found out that you need to follow a couple steps to install something to watch their stuff- DRM, its basically drm. Inconvenient but honestly, I can just use my phone for that kind of stuff and not waste the screen real estate for it. Honestly this should be the wake up call for me to start putting my favorite shows and stuff that I’ve paid for on a hard drive for my personal use.
I started this ubuntu journey because Windows was hounding me about doing an upgrade. I installed Ubuntu on my desktop and at the same time, upgraded my surface go to windows 11. I know its not even close to being a fair comparison, but while the tablet was snappy the first week of installation of windows 11, it quickly became pretty sluggish and I can recall being annoyed with having to update more than a couple times. In comparison, my desktop updates are much more transparent and just plain quick bro.
In conclusion, not bad
Truly the only thing that I miss now is playing No Man’s Sky, so maybe somewhere down the road I’ll have a closed off gaming computer for those pesky exclusives. But that’s waay down the road, for now, I think I’m going to be staying with this setup. I’m not really interested in getting a leaner install on my machine and now that everything is pretty much set up, I should just be able to do my thing and not worry about having to turn off notifications or security updates that render the machine useless for hours.
The ONLY reason I will go back in the near future is if I want to go back to using Unity to make VR games for the Quest again.
Maybe I’ll write an update after a longer amount of time if my setup changes, but for now see ya next time!
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