I use locking axles for the wheels and have the saddle attached with a chain. That reduces the effort quite a bit :) Admittedly I don’t use a saddle bag on the city bike.

With the big trade-off that it eats up space and money when it’s not a weekend or a holiday … I sometimes think it’d be nice to own a car to go out on the weekends, but then I remember that I’d have to pay insurance and taxes independent on how much I use it (which would amout to “any other weekend”, maybe), and couldn’t use my garage as a workshop anymore because it’d be occupied by a car. Plus, short-term rentals and car sharing are a thing … so, yeah … in the end it always feels more like a liability than “freedom”

Theoretically, in many places, bikes are allowed in the same places as cars most of the time. But, if a biker shares the space with cars, it’s just a matter of time before that biker collides with a car. When that happens, the person in the car won’t be injured. The biker may be dead.

Assuming every cyclist who shares the road will eventually have an accident involving a car is kinda fatalist IMHO, but I guess it depends on where you are … where I live, bicycles on the road are very common, both in the city and outside.

My typical ways in the city involve a multilane road that doesn’t have a bike path yet, and while it can be stressful I don’t consider it overly dangerous.

Road cycling is a common pastime here so having bicycles on the country roads is expected, and motorists are required to maintain a certain distance (1.5m), as indicated by many roadsigns along popular roads. They typically comply.

So, yeah, I don’t think it’s a given and very much the results of cultural attitudes more than anything …

Heh I was about to post the exact opposite … now, it’s true that if you want to use certain DAWs and plugins, they’re not available on Linux … but with Ardour, Reaper or Bitwig you still have some very amazing DAWs at your disposal and there are many great plugins available.

Other than that I frequently perform as a laptop musician on stage (with my own software) and I wouldn’t want to use anything but Linux anymore. Pipewire + a class-compliant Interface, esp. on Arch (btw), seems to be the most rock-solid combination I know of …

Drivers on Windows seem to be so consumer-oriented that they try to do all kinds of stuff for you and I wouldn’t trust it at all in a live situation … everything seems to be way to fragile. MacOS is stable but I find the configurability is lacking behind.

When it comes to multichannel audio, I don’t think anything can beat Pipewire or JACK … free system-level anywhere-to-anywhere routing is so much better than the whole aggregate device + blackhole dance you have to do on MacOS … it’s super inconvenient if you ask me (and I’ve been developing multichannel audio software for a living for some time).

So, yeah … It all depends on your needs but for me, as someone who develops audio software both professionally and for their own music practice, and performs frequently, I’d say it’s the other way 'round … Linux, in 2026, blows everything out of the water audio-wise …

I have to admit, when it comes to new developments in the Linux world, I tend to live under a rock … never switched to Wayland, not because I have any ideological reservations, but because my favorite WM (a minimalist WM developed by a friend of mine) is available only for Xorg.

I had heard about NixOS before, but until I stumbled upon this thread, I didn’t have a good understanding about what an atomic distro is. Now that I have a bit of an understanding, I guess I can only repeat what others said before, it seems to be solving a problem that I don’t have. I’ve been using rolling release distros for a very long time (at first Gentoo, like, 15 or more years ago, but Arch (btw) for over a decade now, with occasional, typically short stints in Debian-based distros), and the amount of problems caused by updates has been negligible for the last decade (Gentoo overlays 15 years ago could be a pain, for sure).

It does sometimes bother me that my OS config seems to so … static these days, but then again I have so many things going on in life on that I don’t feel a huge need to prioritize changing an OS that feels blazingly fast to use, stable, minimalist, and basically checks all the boxes. It just became my high-productivity comfort zone.

Hmm my first linux distro was Suse 5.x that came on 5 CDs (i think it was 1998) … can’t say I used it much, I had weird German ISDN Internet at the time and the PPPoverWhatever (forgot the exact name) just didn’t wanna work. Making music wasn’t really feasible at the time. It mostly lay dormant. I slowly climbed the learning curve and switched to Linux full-time in the mid-2000s, when a lot more things were possible …

For whatever reason, many of the editors mentioned here never worked for me … like OpenShot, ShotCut or PiTiVi were really unstable the last time I tried (might be a distro or DE thing). Also I found it hard to cut precisely when they worked. Lightworks, Da Vinci, Cinelerra, I had a hard time getting them to run. Maybe that changed in the meantime.

I ultimately stuck with Kdenlive, which is stable enough and allows for reasonably precise cutting.