If you owned a 16-track reel tape recorder, you’d want it to act like a tape recorder – not to also be a pressure washer, food processor, bidet, or e-bike charger as a side job.
Likewise, I want a DAW that will strictly be a dedicated appliance without it wasting attention on unnecessary tasks; like listening for new emails, checking the calendar, running cutesy apps in the background unrelated to the job at hand… you get it.
As sweet as Ubuntu Studio is for multi multimedia, I am looking for a Linux operating system dedicated to a sole task, without the wowee-zowee gingerbread that other distros come with and boast about. What can be suggested as an almost caveman-minded Linux flavor I can use as a foundation for a single-purpose Ardour DAW, minus all the junk? Thanks from Coastal Virginia USA
It’s been a while since I looked at Ubuntu Studio.
But, other than some pre installed apps tto support configuration of the underlying media hardware and systems, out of the box not that many apps are installed.
Of course, they typically install Firefox and some other “core” apps, it you can uninstall these if you really don’t want them on the menu (or just ignore them, and they shouldn’t impact you in any way).
As for media apps, if you don’t want other tools, don’t install them (or uninstall them if they are installed).
The only consequence of having these apps installed that you aren’t using is a bit of menu clutter and a tiny bit of hard drive usage.
Cheers,
Keith
Arch Linux lets you customize your system however you want, but it is time-consuming to set up. You can accomplish something similar in Debian by deselecting all the options during the tasksel step, chrooting into the OS, and installing just the things you need before rebooting. Doing this allowed me to install the “gnome-core” package rather than the full gnome meta package and desktop extras that Debian includes by default. If you want something even more barebones, an Openbox session is a classic choice. This person has a pretty good tutorial on how to make one using Debian:
Hi,
I completely understand the concept of a “Studio Appliance” our own Studio runs an AV Linux redux that is rarely touched except for Browser and occasional Ardour updates. Truthfully installing Ubuntu Studio (or whatever) and spending an hour of time removing what you don’t want is probably far less time consuming than building a basic OS from a netinstall that will invariably be missing all kinds of specialized configurations and things you didn’t realize you’d need for dedicated Audio work.
Just for my own curiosity I tried to set up a Debian 12 minimal install in a VM.
It took about 10 minutes for base system and another 10 minutes to install Ardour, some plugins, and transfer 8 GB of plugins (vst, vst3, lv2) via ssh from my main machine.
I just installed: xinit, i3-wm, dmenu, ardour, jackd2 (will take care of setting /etc/security/limits.d/audio.conf), lsp-plugins-lv2, x42-plugins, dragonfly-reverb-lv2.
It runs “snappier” than my main machine (considering is a VM). What is bloating more the installation are the dependencies of the file manager.
Here’s the result:
Thanks for the advice, all. I definitely came here for the right reason.
An interesting experiment for sure but a limited use case (i3 would be a tough sell for many people used to DE’s) Try installing PipeWire on Debian and see how far you get without lots of config, JACK is cheating…lol. Also no performance tuning, and it appears a stock kernel and not using ssh and manually copying 8 Gb of Plugins would slow things down pretty considerably. You make a compelling case but I still think stripping an Audio dist down to the essentials is a better bet…
- i3 is just an example of a WM instead of a DE, you can use Openbox or whatever you prefer, I used i3 because is what I normally use and it requires basically zero configuration to work . At the end we are talking about one very narrow use machine, do the job of a DAW and little more.
- My example has no Pipewire running, if you don’t install desktop packages or multimedia applications (like OBS) Pipewire will not be invited to the party.
- What performance tuning are you applying to ALSA? I’m curious.
- Stock kernel is not bad at all, depends on what you are doing,
preempt=fullis already here. - Not clear what you were arguing about SSH or what should slow down, I just used SSH to transfer the plugins to the VM to test if they worked with a minimal set of packages installed, and most of them are working!
I’m not exactly arguing, you’re not wrong. Your scenario just makes some assumptions in my opinion, maybe you’re right on the money with all of them. But maybe the ideal is not exactly the least possible use of RAM, perhaps just the least amount of unused applications and Plugins. If ALSA is not the goal and the OP wants a modular workflow then some tuning might be handy. The SSH comment was not really important other than copying 8Gb to a USB key and then onto another machine would be slower than SSH and a fast connection but really a non-issue and probably not worth me mentioning. Anyway whatever, “all roads lead to Rome”, “live and let live” etc. etc.
My bad, I haven’t understood you were talking about transferring times.
My assumption is simply this:
I thought that in this scenario a full blown DE is unnecessary. Consequently you just need ALSA or JACK since you are probably just using Ardour and little more.
Regarding the number of plugins they are not really a problem, except for the scanning times when you add/delete stuff, but is not really a big deal. I scanned 8GB of them in a few minutes in a VM, and once done you are good, if you are not a plugin maniac you are not going to do it that often. Until they are not executed or scanned by the DAW they are just files resting on your disk.
Of course all this setup can be improved, there many tunings/configs/kernels that can be tried to squeeeze that 5% more of juice, rarely they did a big difference (except disabling SMT 
) to me.