For a short period of time about 2-3 years ago i had a very old MacBook (actualy, not old but ancient ) that i got as a bonus when purchasing other laptop(s). I even got it to dual-boot Windows + AV Linux - i think it was 23.1 or somethingā¦(wasnāt realy easy since i had no prior experience with installing anything on MacBook before).
Eventualy, everything was working well untill one day i spilled Cola in a coffe shop (or was it beer?) all over it, and, unforunately, that was the end of that adventure .
I see some very nice second hand macbooks online (2015-2020), so, i was wondering, does anybody here have that sort of thing going on, what machine exactly do you have, does it work well, do you dual boot, what distro do you use and why, howās ardour+kx exprience on it etcā¦
?
And, kind of off topic, but, if not Mac, what else would you recommend when it comes to laptops? I currently have Lenovo Ideapad Gaming 3 (which is cool specwise) but i guess i hate that keyboard/overal layout and battery life so i mostly avoid it (except when i have to edit video, so i connect another display+keybord+mouse), and older Fujitsu e746 which i love to use but specwise aināt that good.
I remember i always liked those thinkpads that i was using a decade ago, like T440 etcā¦
Interesting thread I donāt see why an old Macbook wouldnāt workā¦ Iāve seen people spin various versions of Ubuntu on them with complete success and no hardware issues etc so I think theyād be valid options.
I myself am a big fan of using Linux on old machines and my main / daily driver laptop is an old Asus from 2013 or something (think itās an ML540 modelā¦?) and I absolutely love it. Disk and RAM are very accessible from underneath enabling easy upgrades. Keyboard has a numberpad. Screen nice and big etc. Iām still on the original battery and get about 60-90 mins on a charge, surprisingly.
While itās obviously unfeasible to run huge projects stacked full of fancy plugs / virtual instruments etc, Iāve adapted my workflows accordingly and only use simple / low-resource plugins (like Airwindows) and I couldnāt be happier. Itās a great box for just noodling about on Renoise withā¦!
As you can see, itās an incredibly underpowered device yet I manage perfectly fine with it See recent song uploads here in āMade with Ardourā, for example.
Yea, iāve had the feeling that, hardwarewise, you could getaway with all sorts of weird stuff , but the question is - what will work and how?
The thing is, iām under the impression that my specific intel chips with igpuās donāt play ball with
LSP plugins.
Iāve tried LifeBook e746(i5, HD520) and ThinkCentre P330 Tower (8th gen i5, HDā¦630?), and niether one of them didnāt play nice with various variants of Debian (+nonfree packages). LSP with openGL is terrible on them. Cairo works, but, not so smoothly.
I havenāt tried my AMD laptop Ideapad Gaming 3 yet (ryzen 5600h, iAMD + Nvidia 3050) cause, as i said, iām kinda repulsed by the phisical laptop experience when it comes to that machine, and also, i donāt wanna open it up, cause i also use it for work related stuff, sidegigs etc.
Thereās also Dell station 8th gen i7, NVidia RTX4000, 24gb ram on my home desk, but thatās the machine i assembled mainly for video editing, and iām also not keen about dual booting with Win11 (which is already there - matter of necessity).
So, iām thinking about options for a practical laptop i can lug aroundā¦just for me .
LSP should work fine for any laptop with Ryzen CPU and integrated Radeon graphics.
Moreover, Iām working on OpenGL and window subsystem optimizations now.
Great. If you have the chance, try it using something with integrated Intel GPU. Open GL generaly seems to be working on both iGPU Intel machines i tried LSP on - i used this command - glxinfo | grep āOpenGL versionā end it gives me result like - āOpenGL version 4.6ā, and everything else graphicaly seems to be working fine, but when i try LSP itās unresponsive and blocks Ardour completely.
I was just about to dismantle my newest AMD based laptop (which is my best but least liked machine) to try and put another ssd besides mv2 windows drive inside and try linux+ardour+LSP on it, but i would rather wait for a while if the software solution is on the horizon.
Hmmm as per SadKoās comment, my Asus laptop has an Intel CPU and the LSP plugs work fine on it (likewise my desktop machine).
Well if youāre reluctant to get something youāve not tested before, Iād recommend just getting a used Mac or aforemetioned T440 (or an Asus ML540, if moneyās tight and youāre OK using low-resource plugs and being mundful of limitations when recording / mixing etc).
Personally though, I canāt see you havkng many problems at all - it feels like almost any Linux distro will play well on 10 year old hardware.
Yes, but is it OpenGL that is doing the rendering?
Cairo works, itās kinda laggy and feels too heavy on cpu, but works.
LSP OpenGL, on the other hand, makes Ardour completely unresponsive.
Iām talking:
-i5 6300U, Intel HD520, 8GB ram, Debian 13 KDE, x11 (also tried XFCE, x11) or AV Linux 25 Enlightment.
-i5 8500, Intel HD 630, 16GB ram, Debian 13 KDE, x11 (also tried XFCE, x11) or AV Linux Enlightment.
Ah sorry I missed that detailā¦ I believe itās OpenGL on both my music machines (both work fine with LSP plugs) but Iād have to check later to be 100% sure. Sorry I canāt be any more specific though.
Cool. When you get the chance, in a LSP plugin instance gui, if itās a version newer than 1.2.21 check under - About - and see if it says Cairo or OpenGL.
Thanks in advance.
Hahah i just realyzed that, since by pure chance i aquired many different machines over the years, i could be a very useful testing platform .
-i5 3rd gen Intel with integrated graphics 8GB ram, Desktop.
-i5 8th gen Intel 8500 with integrated graphics, 16 GB ram, desktop.
-i7 8th gen Intel 8700 with integrated graphics+RTX4000, 24GB ram, desktop
-i5 6th gen 6300u, integrated HD520, 8GB ram, Fujitsu e746 laptop
-AMD ryzen 5600H, amd radeon int + nvidia 3050, 16GB ram Lenovo Ideapad Gaming 3 laptop
-somehere i also have an core2duo motherboard+rest
If i also enter there my wifes old desktop+laptop that would 8 machines
I suppose the main problem of OpenGL and Intel at this moment is multisampling.
LSP uses multisampling which may be a serious penalty issue.
The main reason why LSP went to OpenGL is a very poor performance on polylines. When many polylines are simultaneously drawn in the UI, it turns the UI to lower FPS and drop frames.
OpenGL does not have such problems with polylines on devices with hardware-accelerated OpenGL but still yields to problems on devices with poor 3D acceleration.
āI had some performance issues with my HP Elitebook 850 G3. (The biggest challenge was getting Windows OFF of it).
Then I learned that I had to decrease the buffer size.
Itās been running perfectly ever since.
Does this sound like double Dutch to you? Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUsLLEkswzEā
Noup. It sound like something i intuitively grasped back in 2002. I think you read some weirdly large buffer size numbers from the start of this thread and suspected thatās the main issue.
Try taking that same Ozone frome the video, run 6 instance of it on group tracks + 20 stereo tracks all with different gates, eq, coms, limiters + some large library drum vst etc, run in with integrated sound card and keep the buffer size at 128 samples with that HP. Get back to us how that went .
The audio issues are solved.
The main issue is LSP GUIās locking up Ardour while used with OpenGL in Ardour.
) that i got as a bonus when purchasing other laptop(s). I even got it to dual-boot Windows + AV Linux - i think it was 23.1 or somethingā¦(wasnāt realy easy since i had no prior experience with installing anything on MacBook before).
yet I manage perfectly fine with it 
See recent song uploads here in āMade with Ardourā, for example.