I recently wiped Windows off my ThinkPad X13 Yoga and ran Ubuntu full-time for 30 days as my main creation setup.
Hardware & Power Management:
Suspend/Sleep: Moving away from Windows Modern Standby fixed my biggest mobile hardware headache. Closing the lid triggers true deep sleep, resulting in a flat battery graph overnight instead of a hot laptop in my bag.
2-in-1 UI: 1-to-1 GNOME gestures in tablet mode feel incredibly natural. Paired with extensions like Blur my Shell, the desktop environment looks modern and responsive.
FOSS Workflow Replacements:
Scripting & Notes: Logseq handled all local markdown planning effortlessly.
Graphics & Audio: GIMP and Audacity handled all thumbnail design and voiceover post-processing without friction.
Gaming: Steam Proton ran roughly 90% of my game library out-of-the-box with zero tweaking.
Friction Points:
Video Editing (Free DaVinci Resolve): Free Resolve on Linux lacks native H.264/H.265 MP4 decoding due to licensing. It requires running FFmpeg scripts to transcode footage to ProRes/DNxHR before editing.
Proprietary Standards: Expecting a 1:1 drop-in replacement for Adobe CC or native MS Office isn't realistic—you have to adapt your workflow to open tools.
Overall, desktop Linux feels ~90% ready for creator workflows. I put together a video walking through the full setup, desktop B-roll, and tests if anyone wants a visual breakdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ci_2rxbfwU
Have you tried Kdenlive for video editing?
Found the one person where sleep works on Linux
lol sleep works just fine for me , even have a keyboard that has a sleep button, Guix system, Linux kernel, niri window manager. Volume buttons and pause , play do too. Sleep and hibernate has worked for awhile .
I’m not certain of the last time I had hardware where sleep didn’t just work in Linux. It’s fine in my oldest laptop that only has limited hardware support for sleep modes and extremely good on everything else.
i wonder how often the proprietary stuff is artificial given that examples like nvidia – their stuff is literally built and tested on linux, but they refuse to support it nonetheless.
Video Editing (Free DaVinci Resolve): Free Resolve on Linux lacks native H.264/H.265 MP4 decoding due to licensing. It requires running FFmpeg scripts to transcode footage to ProRes/DNxHR before editing.
If you’re editing MP4 directly, you’re an amateur who has no business editing anything. MP4 is a compressed finalized format suitable for distribution. It gives you virtually zero wiggle room for color correction, etc…
There’s a reason professionals shoot log and shoot in a RAW format that is made specifically for editing. It’s only when the project is ready to be exported should you be going anywhere near MP4.
The people using free davinci resolve are also most likely to be working with h264 and h265.
It’s bizarre that I can just install those codecs and have resolve pick them up from the system like other media players do.
I don’t do any video editing, but couldn’t someone be editing sourced material (for, say, a documentary) that is MP4? That is, already produced material that wasn’t originally shot by the creator in question.
Sure. If for whatever reason you need to re-edit something that you didn’t shoot yourself and you don’t have access to the source files. I suppose that would be one reason to edit the MP4 directly. (so for example, if you’re re-editing someone’s youtube video to make a remix of it for Tiktok). But I don’t consider that to be “professional” editing.
Professional editing is getting hired by a filmmaker (or creating video yourself) that you then edit into a completed work. And in those cases, I’d question why they’re either a) filming in a format like MP4 in the first place, or b) not making the LOG or ProRes source files available to their editor.
Have you tried Lightworks? The free version is less than useless because it limits export to 720p, but it includes all the codecs. Available as a deb, rpm and flatpak. And it’s European - sort of (originally based in the UK, now owned by an American parent company) It’s the other Hollywood tested editing program for Linux
