I’m looking for a new laptop to use as an audio workstation. The OS I’ve been using is Mint (which I’ll presumably need to install). All the audio is coming in over USB from a Behringer UMC404HD interface.
I’m using applications such as Ardour, Audacity, Rosegarden, and Lilypond.
My current laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad from around 2013. It’s still working, but beginning to show it’s limitations (only 4 Gig of ram, for example).
Just curious if anyone has a laptop that you’re using as a music system, that you could recommend.
You do not need much, I think the only question you need to answer is whether you are planning to use sample libraries and/or third-party plugins. You may or may not need to use other operating systems to update the firmware of your audio equipment, but it looks like you are already using USB class-compliant hardware, so your setup is more or less plug-and-play at this point. Pretty much any laptop under the $1,000 CAD range, without a dedicated GPU, is sufficient.
I also use Ardour, and I have my own audio and hardware stack, but there is nothing special about the device that I use to produce music. If you still want a Linux laptop recommendation, give me a budget first, and maybe a criteria for me to filter against. Note that GPU and RAM prices are up at the moment, so any recommendations will default to frugal unless your budget is wide.
Yeah, I hear what you’re saying about ram. The 16Gig sticks I bought for my desktops to round them up the 32Gig were $135 a couple of years ago, and it looks like they’re selling for $200 now.