Thanks so much for answering, this is really helpful, even if I feel pretty indecisive now.

What do you think about LMDE? This would have been my second idea. I'm also not mad about going with Mint for a second time as you recommend. My disliking was purely because of aesthetics, which wouldn't be as important for this Laptop.

As I mentioned in the reply to Noo, I have already changed my mind about DE's. Honestly, I always assumed this Laptop had 8 GB of RAM just like the other - and there I've had the Laptop freeze installing stuff from the AUR - seems this is always the worst part of these Macbooks, but I'm never gonna buy one again anyway. But yeah, I dont have any clue about how much those 4 GB affect my Distro/DE choices, I'm here to learn :D I also saw your post on Mastodon about RAM on Debian Gnome a few Days back, which was one of the reasons why I began second guessing my initial ideas.

I know if I'd look for a substitute for Ableton it would probably be best to just go with Bitwig. But there's also aspects of Ableton I'm not happy with. I generally got bored of it a bit tbf, so it's allright if I feel I start from scratch for a while. Reaper was recommended to me by a few people already, so Reaper it is. Shortcuts and navigation will be hard for a while I assume, but nothing you can't get used to ;)

Yeah LMMS really felt close to FL Studio, used FL a bunch in my youth.

Ubuntu ran really bad on my other Laptop, and I felt overwhelmed by the amount of stuff pre-installed. So I doubt it will be better.

Concerning the Interface, I don't have the extra money to buy a new one currently, so this either works or not.

Ok, so I'll maybe wait on your opinion on LMDE in case you will have time to reply. Will keep Mint on my mind!

Thanks for mentioning Librazik. I'll take a look at it later.

You are right with KDE as DE, and I am happy you mention it. I guess I'm just being lazy with this as I am familiar with it and I like the looks of it. But true, given I really won't do much else on there, it's pretty much a waste of resources, so I'll take that into account.

I will go with Reaper first and hope this will be a good Ableton alternative. Ardour I'm generally just really curious to try out, so I will give it a shot too, maybe later. The website you mention will be great for this, hope I will be able to read through this ;)

It's good to hear about the inteface just working, will see how it goes. I remember searching info on that model I have back on reddit and there was one person who tried to get it to work on linux and it sounded complicated, but that was already a few years back

Thanks for the input! Testing is a good idea. I'll take a look at elive but from what you mention, it's probably not what I'm looking for. Not a huge fan of reading "it comes preinstalled with proprietary software". I'm up for learning the extra steps, I'm actually really interested in it, so this isn't really a big deal for me -- just, well, time-consuming. It's a helpful reply nevertheless, I'll think of this as a solution in case I would really fail. Oh and I probably mentioned the issues because I could not get Wifi/Bluetooth to work before and because I don't use one of the mainstream ones of the focusrite product line, and this could be an issue, maybe not.

I'm a bit late to reply - but no worries about the length, what you write is indeed very insightful and I'm here to listen ;) also, yeah, the past week has been a lot for many...

I think no scene is irrelevant really, no matter how small. You put it quite nicely, music is an experience, that's what it boils down to mostly. I totally get what you write about not being delusional about your achievements within the wider music world. I feel the same about what I do, it's nowhere near perfect lol or close to what other DIY Producers out there do, and it took me some years to not fall into that mindset of comparing yourself with others any longer. I'm mostly doing it for fun and as a way to express myself and I won't ever be able to reach huge amounts of people, but I'm Ok with that (now).

circuit-bending and synths sounds fun, I wish I had more time to experiment with my instruments or get into fiddling around with som tech.. You had a nice group of people hanging out together, and to me it seems actually very ambitious you managed to plan weekly themed events and all of that during lockdowns! I really hope you can still get some of that spirit going now, but it sounds more like you all went their own ways in a sense. I'm curious to hear more about that process of filesharing and how you adopted different ways of making music?

Yeah, Discord, I'm not even surprised. I think the majority of music production oriented communication happens on this platform currently, unfortunately. I considered it as a research field for quite a while as I used to hang out in a few Music production servers, and it would probably have been easy to reach out to artists on there. But I deleted my account already a while back and am really happy with that desicion. Would have been really annoying to register a new account, likely with a phone number required and all that...

I can relate to what you say about making music offline or away from screens. During the pandemic I went 'full on' and spent all day on my computer for work and it wasn't really a problem for me to continue elsewhere to make music. I think I already mentioned that I actually really made a lot of music back then, more than before (and after), I really benefited from being able to spend time at home and not having those daily issues of leaving the house and facing society. My music laptop is usually offline and there's not much else on there than music related stuff, so there's not a chance for much distraction, so maybe that helped staying in the zone..

I've only got really sick of spending as much time on the computer/phone after the pandemic, and had to take a break from it for a while. To me, now it's mainly about listening to music offline - I'm not streaming as much music as I used to and got really annoyed about all that madness of keeping up with the pace on those streaming services. I think discord also played a huge role in feeling overwhelmed with all of this. Managed to reduce a bit of that noise, so now I kind of enjoy just going my own tempo with all of this again, and I feel much more inspired to actually sit down and get something done. Ok maybe now I went off-topic for a bit but it's all kinda connected ^^

Thanks for the reply and your interest in the topic! This takes away a bit of the anxiety after having posted that chunk of text about the project (always takes a bit of courage to start sth like this to be fair)

Fascinating to read that you feel things changed a lot with covid. To me, it's been pretty much the same than before, even though I had a lot more inner peace and in general calmer days to sit down and do music during lockdowns, so I got a lot more accomplished. Something I often struggle with now after.

Curious to hear what you noticed had changed in your local scene, but only if you feel like sharing ;)