I ended up switching to Linux recently for same reasons, but my kids are older and i had time to nerd out and go full Archwiki. Ableton was one of the last holdouts that was keeping me from switching… and I spent a good month dicking around with wine trying to get it to work. And I couldn’t! I ended up selling my Ableton license and buying Bitwig, which is natively supported in Linux, and actually pretty amazing… (I don’t expect you to switch, just telling my story. It has really fun modular synth-like interface, with all the other VST support and quite good out-of-the-box plugins etc.)

I also couldn’t get Affinity Photo working in wine… and gimp doesn’t quite do it for me. So I’m not sure what to do there, so my photo editing hobby is on hold til I figure that out.

That said, some of my other windows stuff works magically in wine (sierrachart, games, etc.).

So with all that in mind, I’d say if you don’t have time to figure it out, and still want ableton to work, it might not be worth the mental load until you have more time on your hands. Unless you have an old laptop lying around, it wouldn’t hurt to just try it and see what you can get working.

haha yeah, I knew it at the “let’s break it down:”
I was like… I know this voice…

I hate that I laughed kind of hard at that. Oh well! Have an upvote.

me three

Entheos!

I use Arch on my main machine, but I just got a new (old!) laptop that I’m going to set up probably with Debian. Someone mentioned I might try Devuan… and learn about all the init stuff… but I’m thinking I’ll keep it simpler for this one and go straight Debian first.

Bach. Anything after that’s pretty cheesy…

Wow, yeah, are we sure those aren’t just some 2025 Oregonians??

David Foster Wallace, shook hands and chatted at a book signing… He was very pleasant, shy-seeming, like you’d expect. RIP!

Philip Seymour Hoffman, shook his hand and chatted briefly, after seeing a play he was in. Oddly similar to DFW: shy, warm, very human. Also RIP!

(I guess, don’t shake my hand?)

Does peanut butter count? I eat it on carrots, dip dark chocolate bars into it, sometimes just scoop it with a spoon. Yum.

amazing pic!!

With Rattle and Hiss, the Slither brothers…

I basically read two types of books. One is lit-nerd stuff (Joyce, Pynchon…) where you can read and re-read and still find new things, find communities online of people discussing it, read it with a friend and share what you got out of each chapter, etc. The other type I do is more immersive sci-fi/fantasy (Rothfuss, Stephenson, etc.) which I read for totally different reasons… like you said, an escape into another world.

TV makes me feel like a spoonfed zombie. I’m trying to watch Severance, and it’s good, but I hate the feeling of being hooked, tied to it, and having to sit there and binge it. And they’re doing all the imaginating for me. I much prefer to spend that 50 hours with a good thick book. No judgment on how other people like to do it… I just prefer the quiet of paging through a book!

Same. Because of the halos, right?

I keep hearing about this thing. Does it really do all the photoshop things? adjustment layers, masks, dodge+burn, all that stuff? and I guess, does it do it well, with big files?

Yeah, that. Opaque means no transparency. Easier to read/work, or see a picture/video without background stuff mixing in with it. But for my non-focused windows, I’m not actively working on those, so rice it up, transparency all the way! (but still add blur to those, just so I can read them if I need to…)

I have my focused window opaque, the rest transparent+blur.

Ah, glad to hear it! I’ll definitely give it a whirl, thanks.

Dang, those are beautiful screenshots. I recently moved over to Linux and have only tried a couple of games on here, but I should see how that one works… haven’t played it in a few months, and I have ways to go in it. I don’t even remember what chapter I’m on.

peni