Ubuntu Studio Review: My Favourite DM, Compositor, Workflow, Latency… Part 1

So recently I have been using Ubuntu Studio as my primary OS, mostly to benefit from its support for creating MIDI music, and also its support for the myriad of devices I own, some of which not even Windows easily supports anymore.

Now, back when Ubuntu Studio first came onto the scene, it used Xubuntu (or the XFCE desktop environment) as its base. This made sense; it offered virtually everything that Gnome did, just a bit flashier. So that hardware power could be devoted to music making. Or photo-editing. Or whatever floats your boat. It was also seen as the “lightweight” desktop environment at the time.

Since then, however, things have changed. The “lightweight” monicker has now been taken by Lubuntu/LXDE… which has in turn moved over to QT, now being called LXQT. This also makes sense; I have always found QT very lightweight when I have used it on Windows. Meanwhile, there have been constant wars over the direction of Gnome and KDE for the last 5 or 6 years, with Gnome fragmenting more it appears… With Mate, Cinnamon, Gnome-Shell and now Gnome-Flashback on the scene.

Just to complicate matters… I personally loved the Gnome-Shell environment. I loved swiping to the top left corner to find my apps and windows; I loved the removal of the minimise button; I loved the translation of the mobile metaphor to a desktop environment. I acknowledge not everyone liked this… And admit I used Cinnamon rather than the official Gnome-Shell in the past, only because it was the first to receive extensions and meant I could customise it just that little bit more. In this environment, XFCE feels a bit homeless.

So, I decided today: I would install, and try out every sensible combination I can think of, in order to decide which one works the best. There won’t be any scientific basis to my conclusions, so please accept them merely as a hobbyist music maker. I don’t intend on doing clean installs or going the whole way. Just go with the combination that feels right.

Despite not being scientific, I aim to evaluate each interface/environment combination based on these headers:

• Performance: How does it run? Are there many slowdowns? Am I still able to do what I need from the software?
• Ease-of-Use: This will be rated based on how much setup is required after booting up. Potentially, I may include how hard it was to get the system into the state I wanted to as well.
• Graphics: This overlaps with the previous two a little bit. Does the interface look nice and consistent, across GTK and QT/KDE apps? Even if it requires some extra initial setup. Also, does it just look… nice? Here, I compare with MacOS… Or at least, how people describe it. I have only owned one Mac in my life, and I’ve never liked the Apple fetishism. Really, here, I want to be able to show that Linux/Ubuntu can be a decent alternative to a Mac.

So, that is my basis. I think to begin with I will be using SDDM + KDE as my starting point. Additionally, I am using the kxstudio repository, as I prefer using Cadence for managing my JACK/ALSA audio.

Finally, I wish to repeat, there is nothing scientific about this. It is likely you may be more technically minded than myself, or alternatively more audiophile than myself. This is an experiment for me as much as you, the reader! Enjoy!

Python App 3: "Plong" For Windows

Another common problem I find with learning a programming language is how far you really need to get into learning a language before you get any useful returns in creating anything that even resembles an everyday Windows/Android game.

So, I was desperate to move on to something as an "Interlude" to my second Python app to investigate how difficult it actually would be to port some form of Python code into a ".exe" or ".apk" we are used to.

In my investigation, I discovered Kivy... Which acts as a library to create and compile apps to Windows, iPhone, Linux, Android and pretty much anything else you could name. So I dived into their Pong Game Tutorial

It was refreshingly simple to set up, as I had already used pip to set up PyCharm (pip feeling very similar to how something like apt-get works). Installing everything I needed was a breeze... Even typing, running and making changes to their code was quite easy considering I'd already had some deeper experience of Python now under my belt... I was probably at about the right part of my education to start "experimenting"!

The only fiddly part was subsequently completing their tutorial to Create A Package For Windows, only really fiddly because you had to manually park command prompt in the empty folder you wanted to compile to, manually add a name in the command you type in then manually edit the created ".spec" file to include the files of your project. I mean really it was easy stuff too, although used to the ease of projects up to now I only question why no-one has simplified this experience as of yet. Equally, it finally made me feel like doing "real" coding.

It spat out a "Plong.exe" file, I launched it... And it ran exactly as it did in PyCharm! Finally, I had created my first ever application! There are some things that niggle me, like the command prompt that opens before the actual game which I wish I could silence (saying that even Steam Games such as Metal Gear Solid V do the same thing). There is also the small fact it isn't completely mine, it is largely the unedited code from their website at the moment as I wanted to quickly progress to actually compiling the thing. But, actually, if you're an intermediate at computing like me (and barely an intermediate at programming) you'll actually find the whole compilation process pretty simple.

Plong.exe is available at https://github.com/GlitchWalker/Python-and-Kivy-Pong-Game/releases, and as always my source code is available at my GitHub