Damn, it looked like candy to me too until I read your comment. Now all I see is candy guitar pick.

I’m going to second the comment to leave well enough alone. Do NOT mess with your machine if its what makes you money.

I know you commented you don’t have funds for a second computer to test with but that really is the best step for you.

This is especially regarding some of your other details. You are not in for a quick and smooth transition (sorry to say).

VSTs are “sort of” supported on Linux. Basically they’re not and there are work arounds that I haven’t done using wine for compatibility.

I run a virtual machine for the windows software I am reliant on. So basically my Photoshop etc I use Affinity in a windows VM and it works fine. Depending if you get intensive with your work you might need a lot of resources or experience lag. But for the most part it should be fine. Look into virt-manager for your VM if you want to go that route.

Besides the VST issue, audio recording will probably give you additiinal problems. I haven’t delved into it because he rabbit hole went too deep for me, but from what I’ve read there tends to be issues with audio in VMs (tremendous lag for one).

But all that being said, there should be a solution for all of your needs. It probably won’t be straight forward though given your use cases. I don’t want to sound negative with my warnings, I just want to make sure you don’t shoot yourself in the foot with your work.

Yeah, I’m in the same boat as you. But I’ve noticed my maps dont update any longer so I’m glad this is all coming together at the same time.

They keep pushing new outlook so hard, but it is still lacking basic features. Want to add a contact with a vcf file? Nope, can’t do that. Want to have access to other email boxes? Nope, can’t do that. Want to send an email without being prompted that you may have forgotten an attachment? Nope. OK OK, but they say its better and we should all use it. Fine, I’ll bite. OK so can I get my mobile app to function the same way? Nope. No “new” app for mobile.

Yeah, I’m already running opnsense on an old PC with an added network card. Then I use Unbound DNS with various blacklist filters on my outbound traffic.

It honestly seems good enough because I monitored it for a while when I set it up. But I don’t monitor it continually and I don’t have specific blocks that I set up myself, just the published blacklists. If something new is phoning home I’d be unaware until I check it, which is what I like about your setup.

Smart. Right now I just rely on various blacklists that seem to block everything I need to. I might do something like this at some point though to be sure.

This was my thought too. Seems easiest to me to DNS block on the firewall side (and be network wide).

I would highly recommend this as I did something similar. I ran Linux on an older machine separate from my main machine. I did so for about 10 months. Plus I built out a gaming machine for somebody and set up another old machine as a media center, both with Linux.

I finally made the 100% switch just a few months ago. I bought a new M.2 drive and swapped out just like you are planning. I really needed to make sure I had no hitches for work purposes. I haven’t even considered swapping back (though in full transparency I have Windows running on a VM for some apps that I can’t get in Linux)

In case you aren’t aware of it. !squirrels@lemmy.ca

Thanks for all the info. I did some testing and a bunch of apps that didn’t work before are now working. Not everything, but a lot more than before.

That’s crazy. It didn’t work for any of the banking apps I tried it with. Maybe I’ll give it another try since it’s been a while.

And what simple setting is that? I have multiple apps that don’t work because their app developers use Google as the security verification, which is very common with banking apps.

I’m fully in support of LibreOffice and the fact that it can do a lot for free. However it is far from an enterprise product.

I’m still waiting for anybody to make a true competitor to Excel. There’s some decrnt spreadsheet software but there’s really no comparison to the functionality of Excel. Even Google sheets is a distant second.

My point is, when there are power users involved LibreOffice just won’t cut it.

OK thanks for confirming. I’ll stick with Affinity for now. I didn’t know abit kdenlive, something to check out. I’m still getting use to davinci resolve as it is.

You have a good point in needing to try other things, but there’s also a reasonable need to stick with the workflow that works for you.

One of their pledges when they were bought was to always have a standalone product to buy so people don’t have to do subscriptions.

That’s what I do. There’s few programs I still need windows for so I just spin up a VM for them.

How’s the gimp/krita/inkscape transition going? I’ve used Gimp and Inkscape, and they are fine tools, but I don’t think they are Affinity level yet. Though admittedly it’s been a few years since I last touched them.

Question, are you running it? I got really hopeful about it but feedback I read said it wasn’t very good. It worked, technically, but was buggy making it less than ideal. I forget all the details but it was enough to make me not want to even try it.

There’s something about simplicity that is underated.

Technically my first ditro was SuSE a loooong time ago but I didn’t stick with it. Then back when Ubuntu became he new hit thing I tried that, but again didn’t stick with it.

I have now loaded up Mint and that’s the one I’m running with. Mind you, all distros have come a long way since my prior Linux dealings but Mint is the one to make me permanently switch.