I’ve digitised my CDs over the years and now I’m parting with a lot of the CDs. So to hear this stuff on my good hi-fi (nowhere near my computer or hard drives) I’ll need a jukebox laptop connected to my hi-fi equipment.
My idea is I’ll want a cheap laptop that will do nothing but be this jukebox. It will boot, I’ll run a music-playing app (e.g. VLC or the like) and I’ll have an extractor dongle get the digital audio signal from an HDMI cable to go to the amp/CD player. Those two items have the quality digital-analogue converters.
So further to this, I’m thinking - this sounds like a job for LINUX. I’ve never used it. I don’t think it will be a challenge for me set up a computer like this, but I am looking for some general advice.
I hear there are all these LINUX distributions. How can I tell which one I’d want? Or is there one you’d recommend for such a task? And do they have minimum hardware specs?
My experience with cheap PCs running Windows has been uniformly appalling in life. I have to do IT on my sister’s series of shit computers. Truly agonising, time-wasting, flashing interrupting windows, demanding updates that go on forever, things have kinks, exceptions, things don’t work, etc.
I’m curious, how much of such experiences do you think might be attributable to the combination of the PC cheapness and the OS? I mean, I’m curious, with a stable jukebox setup that basically won’t need updating, would I expect any such awfulness to continue? I’m not holding you to it if you say no I’m just trying to get an idea if Windows magnifies the badness of cheap hardware that might be fine if blanked and then not subjected to it. I never thought about it until now.
If I understand your requirements yeah, a laptop running linux would work, and specifically I would expect it to work in a “set it up once and then not have to fiddle with it a lot” sort of way.
If you don’t already have a laptop and you’re not looking for that specific form factor for other reasons you might consider something like a Raspberry Pi or other small form factor SBC. There are also purpose-built linux distros, like LibreELEC, that are specifically for running media players.
The good thing about Linux is you don’t have to stay with a distro (distribution). So, you can try one and if you don’t like it swap it for another one.
I would recommend stick with the well known distribution at first, and check the laptop specs before you buy it.
There’s some useful links here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/389176/is-there-a-database-of-linux-compatible-hardware
I always used Ubuntu Studio because it has all the music software already installed, but this is not required.
Some of the distro I would look into would be: Debian, Ubuntu, Manjaro and Mint. Most of them you can flash the image into a bootable usb drive and test them before install them.
Yes, Windows does “magnify the badness of cheap hardware”. You can definitely expect a smooth experience if you choose the right distro.
Each distro has its own minimum hardware specs and RAM is the crucial factor. For example, if Linux Mint Cinnamon is too resource-heavy, use Linux Mint XFCE (lighter desktop environment). If even that is too heavy, drop to something even less resource-hungry.
This can be a time-saver: you can run Linux from a CD or USB stick in live mode and test whether all of your hardware works. Only install the distro if stuff seems okay, otherwise try another one.
Linux Mint has lots of drivers already built-in, it’s maybe the best distro in that regard.
Even if your dedicated laptop won’t need Internet connection, it’s really nice to have Internet connection initially when setting up things / installing things. (If you have an old laptop without netword card, it’s doable, but not as nice.)
I’d recommend any Ubuntu-based distro with the XFCE desktop. Until a few years ago I used Xubuntu exclusively. Linux Mint is another fork of Ubuntu, and there’s an XFCE option for it.
Why these choices?
XFCE is
Lightweight (there’s very little bundled software and it has low CPU+memory demands)
Very flexible with its desktop UI – you can make it look like Windows, Mac, or anything else
Good pulseaudio and alsa integtration, so audio connections are usually automatically detected
Why Ubuntu-based?
Ubuntu has a very strong software repository, plus support for .deb software packages, plus the snap store (which is somewhat bloated but is similar to a mopbile app store and easy for new users).
Easy to use with proprietary drivers (which aren’t so easy to use on free software-focused distros like Debian)
Audio management
You probably will want to get familiar with Linux’s audio tools: pulseaudio+alsa and whatever GUI sound tool you end up with.
Like with Windows, the 1% of the time that your device isn’t detected, you should know how to choose the right audio input/output. Your options:
Fiddling with the GUI, and sometimes the CLI, just like with Windows. Easy but not efficient.
There’s this taskbar sound switcher applet – it’s a menu that only detects the inputs and outputs that are available. Very fast and useful but it might break if it’s not maintained.
Writing a bash script that does the same thing as 2. It can be done.
Advanced partition management
Apart from that, you can also save yourself a lot of time if your Linux installation breaks and you have to reinstall it (or if you just want to move to another distro).
When installing the OS for the first time, you can create a separate home partition for your personal files, ie. you music files.
In fact, this is an ideal time to try partition management since you’re not storing your most important files on this computer.
(Yes, at some point you probably will screw up and install the system on the wrong partition due to negligence.)
Power and session management
I’ve been using Linux since 2009 and there’s one thing that gives me a headache: power and session management.
Linux now has great out-of-the-box support for pretty much all of my system devices, from sound to wifi to keyboard/mouse, but I sometimes have problems resuming those devices when waking the system up from sleep or logging in/out.
I usually have to go in and tweak some things after each fresh install to make sure the entire system wakes up properly.
This depends on your exact laptop hardware though. You might have irresolvable problems if you have a laptop that’s too old, or you might have no problems at all. You might have better luck with a desktop in this area.
Software updates, notifications
Truly agonising, time-wasting, flashing interrupting windows, demanding updates that go on forever, things have kinks, exceptions, things don’t work, etc.
Most Linux distros with a desktop environment will try to update your software and system automatically, just like Windows, and arguably in a way that’s just as annoying. Albeit probably less frequent.
IIRC, Windows forces critical updates, but you can turn off updates entirely with Linux if you want to take that risk.
On top of that, you can disable desktop notifications on Linux just like in Windows.
Plus… if you really need to get rid of something altogether, you can do it! Uninstall the screensaver or the app crash reporter if you want! If it’s not a core part of the system or desktop environment, you can get rid of it.
Hopefully that make sense. It’s not as complicated as it sounds, probably.
The bottom line is that you’ll be free from bloat and have a ~95-99% working system instantly after installing Linux – but you might have to do some stuff under the hood to get it working the way you want.
Take a look at MPD (Music Player Daemon). You can run it on the laptop but control it from a client on another device, so the laptop itself can just hide by your hi-fi equipment and you don’t have to touch it.
I’m not clear on whether you already have this laptop, but another option would be a Raspberry Pi with a big hard drive and an audio interface plugged into it.
Thanks for all the input so far everyone, very helpful.
I don’t have the theoretical laptop yet, so I am considering the Raspberry Pi path. I realise that whatever I do, I’m going to have to attach an external hard drive to it. I have over 400gig of flac.
I’m just trying to get an idea if Windows magnifies the badness of cheap hardware that might be fine if blanked and then not subjected to it. I never thought about it until now.