Professional workflows on Margine

Why Distrobox for proprietary tools (and not rpm-ostree layering)

DaVinci Resolve, BricsCAD, Maya, AutoCAD, MATLAB — vendors ship their own .deb / .rpm / .run installers with assumptions about /usr layout, kernel modules, library versions. Layering them with rpm-ostree install would slow every future upgrade and break when the vendor expects to write to paths the immutable system protects.

Distrobox sidesteps that completely. You get a real distro inside a container, with sudo, package manager, and full access to your home, GPU, audio, X11/Wayland, USB devices. The vendor sees a normal Ubuntu 22.04 (or whatever) — your host OS doesn't budge an inch. Removing a tool is distrobox rm <name>.

DistroShelf (preinstalled in Margine DX, find it in Activities) is the GUI for managing containers: create, enter, install, remove — all without typing.

DaVinci Resolve (video editing + colour grading)

Free tier (1080p) and Studio tier (4K, NR, hardware decoders). Both ship as a single .run installer for Ubuntu / Rocky Linux. Setup:

1. Download Resolve from Blackmagic Design's site (free registration). You get a .zip with a .run inside.
2. Open DistroShelf → Create new container → pick Ubuntu 22.04 (Resolve's officially-supported base) → name it resolve.
3. From DistroShelf, Enter the container. You're in a normal Ubuntu shell. Run the installer:

# Inside the resolve container
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y libfuse2 ocl-icd-libopencl1 fakeroot xz-utils
# Extract Blackmagic's installer (path matches the file you downloaded)
unzip ~/Downloads/DaVinci_Resolve_*_Linux.zip -d /tmp/resolve
sudo /tmp/resolve/DaVinci_Resolve_*_Linux.run --install
# Optional: expose the launcher to the host
distrobox-export --app /opt/resolve/bin/resolve

That last line makes a desktop entry appear in your Margine Activities so you can launch Resolve like any other app. GPU access works out of the box (Margine's Mesa freeworld + Vulkan/OpenCL stack is exposed to the container).

For Studio (paid) you'll also want the BMD hardware key drivers — same Distrobox, same installer flow, the BMD docs cover it.

BricsCAD (CAD)

Vendor ships a .deb only. Bricsys provides Ubuntu 22.04 / 24.04 as supported targets. Same pattern:

1. Download the BricsCAD .deb from bricsys.com.
2. DistroShelf → Create container → Ubuntu 24.04 → name bricscad.
3. Enter the container and install:

sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/bricscad_*.deb
sudo apt-get install -f         # pull missing deps
distrobox-export --app bricscad

BricsCAD relies on the network license server for paid tiers; configure it on first launch as you would on stock Ubuntu — nothing Margine-specific.

Pro audio (Reaper + low-latency kernel + JACK / PipeWire)

Margine ships Reaper preinstalled already (Flatpak). For pro-audio work, three knobs matter beyond Reaper itself:

1. The kernel

Margine ships CachyOS with the BORE scheduler (Burst-Oriented Response Enhancer). BORE prioritises short bursts of activity — which is what audio buffer cycles look like — and delivers measurably more stable frame times under load. No setup, it's there.

For sessions where you want to compare sched_ext behaviour, open Margine CPU Scheduler from Activities and try a shipped scheduler such as scx_lavd or scx_flash (predictable low-jitter latency — the audio pick). Use Off to return to the kernel default BORE scheduler.

ujust margine-scheduler lavd
ujust margine-scheduler off

The scheduler picker is opt-in. Margine leaves scx_loader disabled until you choose a scheduler, so the default desktop stays on BORE unless you explicitly switch. Full guide — what each scheduler is for and how to benchmark honestly: CPU schedulers.

2. The sound server

Bluefin DX ships PipeWire with the pipewire-jack shim — that means apps that expect a JACK server (Ardour, Carla, ZynAddSubFX, most VST hosts) just work as if they were talking to JACK. No need to install or run jackd separately.

Tune the latency from EasyEffects (preinstalled) → top-right menu → Preferences → "PipeWire quantum / sample rate". Lower quantum = lower latency, higher CPU cost. Typical: quantum 64 at 48 kHz for live monitoring; 1024 at 48 kHz for mixing. EasyEffects itself (presets, per-device autoload, when to bypass) has its own page.

3. The user limits

For consistent sub-10 ms latency, your user should be in the realtime group. Margine ships the realtime-audio limits ready to go — you just need to add your user to the group:

sudo usermod -aG realtime $USER # Log out + back in to pick up the new group.

Machine learning / GPU compute (PyTorch, Stable Diffusion, ROCm / CUDA)

ML workloads want huge dependency trees pinned to specific CUDA / Python / driver versions. Forcing those onto an immutable host is wrong; Distrobox is right.

For NVIDIA: DistroShelf → Ubuntu 22.04 (the version PyTorch's prebuilt wheels are tested against) → enter → install the CUDA toolkit per NVIDIA's apt instructions. The host's NVIDIA driver is exposed to the container automatically through nvidia-container-toolkit (which ships in Bluefin DX).

For AMD: ROCm via Ubuntu 24.04 container. Margine's host Mesa stack already includes mesa-libOpenCL + ROCm-compatible drivers for runtime, the container only needs the toolkit:

distrobox create --name ml-amd --image ubuntu:24.04
distrobox enter ml-amd
sudo apt install -y rocm-hip-sdk
# install pytorch with the right ROCm wheel index, etc.

The Margine creative chain (already preinstalled)

Margine ships these on first boot — no setup, no installs needed:

• GIMP — raster image editing
• Inkscape — vector graphics
• Pinta — Paint.NET-style lightweight editor
• darktable — RAW developing + photo management
• OBS Studio — recording + streaming
• Audacity — multitrack audio editing
• Reaper — pro-audio DAW
• EasyEffects — system-wide audio equaliser / processing
• Apostrophe — distraction-free Markdown writing
• Gapless (g4music) — local-library music player
• LibreOffice — office suite

All Flatpaks, all sandbox-isolated, all updated daily by uupd.timer. None of them required a single click on your part to be there.