I know, it sounds odd, but: Arch! Once my best friend wanted to try linux. So he asked me, which distro to use. I gave him an honest answer: “I use Arch. But for beginners I would recommend Mint.” He don’t gave a shit and installed Arch anyways 😅 - with success! That’s when I noticed, that the Arch Wiki is actually SO GOOD, that even a newbie can install Arch without any help. It’s just a bit more time expensive, compared to distros with an installer. However, there are some huge benefits, that made me switch to Arch:

• I used Ubuntu on my daily driver before. However “stable” packages means in this case “antique”. A 3 years old version of Sway isn’t more stable than the newest release version.
• I never survived a dist-upgrade. That’s why i prefer a roling release linux today.
• Your system is slim, because you only install what you really need. Also you know your system this way.
• Especially for gaming it’s good to have the newest kernel + drivers.

However, you should also notice the down sides. Sometimes an update breaks something. It doesn’t happens often, but it happens. A few years ago the bluetooth stack was broken, so i wasn’t able to use my headset during a meeting. However they released a fix like a few hours later, so I just needed to update. But still: That’s something to consider too.

If you want to start cheap, I can recommend you to use an old notebook. In my opinion it’s the perfect home server for beginners.

• It’s cheap (most people have an unused laying around anyway)
• If it’s old enough to still have a dvd drive, you can replace it with a second sata ssd. There are cheap frames for this available.
• it has a battery, so it can shutdown if there is a power outage
• It’s slim. You can just throw it on your closet and forget about it

Most services don’t need much. So it’s just fine if your “server” is like 10 years old. My first notebook server had 2 cores and 4 GB ram and it run Proxmox with like 10 lxc containers just fine.

I’m using MusicBrainz Picard. However there are some tricks to spare you some nerves:

• you can set weights to release types in the settings. Singles and compilations should have a lesser weight than albums.
• Don’t add too much music at once. Or you’ll get crazy selecting the correct releases. I usually go with one artist a time. Especially for older artists I just add one album a time. You can enable the file Browser in the view settings, than you can just drop them in one after the other.
• in the right pane you can just drag and drop whole releases to merge them together.
• Also noticable is the rename feature in the settings. It’s just awesome!

Another hint: Even if Lutris claims to be for games, there are often install scripts for windows applications too. So it may be worth to try to run your apps with Lutris. It should be in the mint packages (try sudo apt install lutris). Then you can add your software in Lutris with the upper left “+” button. Just use the search in the dialog box. I managed to run FL Studio like this, exactly as performant as on windows. Good luck and welcome to the linux family!

That’s a cool approach! Reminds me of the old Napster 🤓

Awesome! I just learned something today. Thanks for pointing it out so detailed!

yt-dlp can handle YouTube Music Links. Just tell it with -x --audio-format mp3, that you don’t want the Video, but an mp3 (opus can’t be tagged). I use it to obtail whole artists, then I tag them with MusicBrainz Picard. I’m sure there is a way to automate this. yt-dlp has also a Python library. However I haven’t used it for now.