What would make you switch to Linux?

Anything about MUSIC but doesn't fit into the forums above.
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bigcat1969 wrote:What stops me using Linux. Experience. It also stops me eating flies.
Based on an admitted limited, unscientific 70,000 page view sample on my blog, 6% of the world of musician type people who like freebies use IE. Chrome leads at 39%, followed by Firefox at 34% and Safari at 15%. Nothing else tops 1%.
Country wise that's based on roughly 40% US and 35% EU with the rest scattered across the world.
OS you ask? 66% Windows, 23% Mac, 4% Linux, 2% IPad, nothing else tops 1%.
Getting a Food Handler's card required viewing a documentary on the
lifestyle of flies. I've never eaten another one, after seeing that movie :hihi:

Those stats typically ignore the multitudes of linux servers,
the hordes of android phones/tablets, and linux embedded in myriad
common electronic devices.
Cheers

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glokraw wrote: Those stats typically ignore the multitudes of linux servers,
the hordes of android phones/tablets, and linux embedded in myriad
common electronic devices.
Of course, all of those things are what linux is good for, but, the majority of linux audio workstations are in that 4%. That 4%, in fact, is almost certainly overstated with respect to assessing linux audio machines. I regularly read blogs and download things on my linux box that I have no intention of running there.

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The title should be 'what would make you switch to linux' not whats stopping me from switching to linux.

What's stopping me from throwing away my iphone in exchange for a nokia? What stops me from eating 40 bananas a day? Nothing. There's no incentive to do either.

Now my personal experience with linux has been not entirely positive. The only time I used it was when I was absolutely forced to. I use windows 7 for my DAW and Win8 for browsing. They're both great and there's no NEED to switch. No benefits whatsoever. Cost? Sure. What else? Nothing.

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foosnark wrote:
chk071 wrote:I wonder how many people, outside of america, because i know that there's the most IE users there, really use IE on Windows.
There's a saying about Internet Explorer: it's the #1 most used browser for downloading another browser.

Actually I don't get it at all. IE has simply been the best browser in my experience. Chrome regularly fails to load some websites for me which IE does perfectly fine.

IE is also very snappy. The only positive with chrome is the integrated searching and apps.

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Based on personal experience, I actively avoid Linux because:

1. The user experience sucks, from top to bottom. It's better than it ever was, but it's still inferior to Windows. And I hate Windows.

2. Software availability. I don't mind paying for good software.

3. The user community (during my experience period) tended to be nothing but anti-user elitist nerd boys, with very little social intelligence or interpersonal skills.

After years of using Windows and wanting out, I used BeOS for quite some time, and tried out several Linux varieties (all inferior to BeOS, even with BeOS's incompleteness and nonexistent software). I wasn't going to go back to Windows, and since Linux is inferior to Windows, on a non-server, non-programmer geek basis, I sure as hell wasn't going to try to convert to Linux either. So I moved to Mac OS X. I'm hoping OS X "Yosemite" doesn't make me regret that, but then I DID willingly change my Vista system to Windows 8.1, so i think I can tolerate a little visual style/behavior change... so long as it's not extreme and violates good GUI design standards, like going from iOS 6 to iOS 7.

Frankly, Linux isn't even on my radar any more. I gave up on the alternative OS scene when I decided to try to be productive with my computers (and the market proved to be so hostile to alternatives to Windows that even Mac OS struggled to get developer support... granted that was ).
- dysamoria.com
my music @ SoundCloud

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ghettosynth wrote:
glokraw wrote: Those stats typically ignore the multitudes of linux servers,
the hordes of android phones/tablets, and linux embedded in myriad
common electronic devices.
Of course, all of those things are what linux is good for, but, the majority of linux audio workstations are in that 4%. That 4%, in fact, is almost certainly overstated with respect to assessing linux audio machines. I regularly read blogs and download things on my linux box that I have no intention of running there.
I'm pretty sure the 4% is 'general desktop/laptop' use, of which linux audio workstations
would make up only a very small slice.

I imagine percentage wise, only a similar small slice of windows/mac users
are daw-using musicians, since most people are contentedly self relegated
into a life of spectatorship.

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keyman_sam wrote:The title should be 'what would make you switch to linux' not whats stopping me from switching to linux.

What's stopping me from throwing away my iphone in exchange for a nokia? What stops me from eating 40 bananas a day? Nothing. There's no incentive to do either.

[snip] ... there's no NEED to switch. No benefits whatsoever. Cost? Sure. What else? Nothing.
I'm in full agreement here. I've seen the "why not switch" question repeatedly asked by alternative operating system enthusiasts for years. They don't seem to perceive the difference between themselves and everyone else. The difference is often that the alternative OS enthusiast finds purpose of use in "computing" itself. Everyone else has something else in mind when they sit down in front of their computer; not "computing as fun". If the user is a server-side programmer (or developer of other non-end user product), maybe their purpose unifies with the likes of the Linux enthusiast. If the user is a musician, artist, or other type of non-coding content-creating specialty (or just an end user), their purpose couldn't be much more profoundly different from that of the linux enthusiast's.
- dysamoria.com
my music @ SoundCloud

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If I weren't a musician I would've switched to Linux over 15 years ago. However it is my very hard learned experience that Linux has very poor audio drivers, to give them the highest rating I can ever give them, that ain't compatible with the gear I use; traktor kontrol s4 mk2 or EMU 0404 USB for instance. None of these devices work very reliable in Linux. They either crash my system forcing a reboot in the next best case, or they hold up 0.1 second after they crash and forces a reboot in the best case. No I wouldn't trust Linux to handle my music needs over my dead body! I have Linux on an ISO, but I wouldn't even trust it running in VirtualBox either.

I got Linux installed, but I'm seriously considering to reformat those disks to NTFS for more storage. I would totally love to switch to Linux, but since many hardware developers doesn't consider Linux to be a viable solution, I'm sticking with Windows.
Best regards from Johan Brodd.
JoBroMedia since 1996.

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glokraw wrote:
ghettosynth wrote:
glokraw wrote: Those stats typically ignore the multitudes of linux servers,
the hordes of android phones/tablets, and linux embedded in myriad
common electronic devices.
Of course, all of those things are what linux is good for, but, the majority of linux audio workstations are in that 4%. That 4%, in fact, is almost certainly overstated with respect to assessing linux audio machines. I regularly read blogs and download things on my linux box that I have no intention of running there.
I'm pretty sure the 4% is 'general desktop/laptop' use, of which linux audio workstations
would make up only a very small slice.

I imagine percentage wise, only a similar small slice of windows/mac users
are daw-using musicians, since most people are contentedly self relegated
into a life of spectatorship.

No disagreement of course, I assumed that the parent is running some sort of music blog, of which, 4% of his visitors were linux using. That is, 4% of those pre-filtered to be interested in music production might be using linux. I didn't actually look to see if his site is music related. My point is, that whatever the number, it is almost certainly an overestimate of DAW users simply because people who use linux seriously, i.e. not simply because it might be an alternative to something else but because it's useful in its own right, use more than one computer. I doubt that browsing statistics are a good indicator of linux as DAW OS. On the other hand, people not interested in linux are, in my experience, more often OS centric. So, there is probably a stronger correlation between windows/mac browsers and windows/mac DAW usage.

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For a while between computers, I was having to use a shared computer with Fedora installed on it (I think it was 13).

Now, I've been futzing with various machines since the TI-99/4A; I remember System 6 and 7, GEM, and Windows since 3.1-
I am not particularly frightened by learning a new OS, and was at last half-acquainted with how UNIX-based systems worked,
back from the old dumb-terminal days, and had an idea of Linux, and what the point was behind it.

So I cracked my knuckles, did some homework, and found that I could cobble together a system that could let me do some audio
mangling; I managed to get a few remixes done (Ardour being the most complete/least broken DAW at the time), but..

TOO MANY DANGLING ENDS! Too much digging and tinkering and finding what looked like a good workaround to a limitation,
only to find x-widget which allowed y-solution to work with z-flavor of distro had been abandoned for 3 years, etc.
I saw a LOT of mini-projects that looked like a small group of people got really ambitious and excited for a very short time,
until the scale of difficulty combined with a lack of support killed any notion of seeing it through to something usable.
Ideals about FLOSS and the like are wonderful when somebody else is doing all the work without expectation of some sort
of compensation.

Also, too many flavors of OS (with fanatical supporters of each) to sort through.. Yes, lots of power and control, but I for one
would like to spend less time crafting the perfect OS and more time using solid applications that don't require quite so much
fiddling and workarounds.. emulators immediately don't excite me.

I love the idea of having a lean,mean, clean machine that doesn't treat me like a soccer mom with a Xanax addiction who
needs to be hand-held through basic operations and kept safely away from the inner workings... it's just that as it stands,
Linux-based systems for users like me aren't quite at the level of maturity they need to be yet.
Music can no longer soothe the worried thoughts of monarchs; it can only tell you when it's time to buy margarine or copulate. -xoxos
Discontinue use if rash or irritation develops.

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jobromedia wrote:the gear I use; traktor kontrol s4 mk2 or EMU 0404 USB for instance. None of these devices work very reliable in Linux.
I can't imagine any honest linux user suggesting they would.

If you want simple i/o success in linux audio, best to get an maudio pci soundcard.
The snd_ice1712 kernel module that supports them, has worked fine in a dozen
linux distros I've used. (Still, solid i/o alone would not be enough,
for the specialized needs of a working dj)
puppy
pclinuxos
arch
fedora
bodhi
mint
plain debian
dyne:bolic
mandriva
suse
knoppix
mepis
dsl
Cheers

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I really like Linux for everything except audio and/or midi. I use some version of Linux Mint on one of my machines and it's great for internet/office type of stuff. Also, Gimp is very good for image editing. But I'm a professional musician. I need the best tools and have no time for tinkering. So for that I use a Mac and sometimes a Windows box.

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glokraw wrote:
jobromedia wrote:the gear I use; traktor kontrol s4 mk2 or EMU 0404 USB for instance. None of these devices work very reliable in Linux.
I can't imagine any honest linux user suggesting they would.

If you want simple i/o success in linux audio, best to get an maudio pci soundcard.
The snd_ice1712 kernel module that supports them, has worked fine in a dozen
linux distros I've used. (Still, solid i/o alone would not be enough,
for the specialized needs of a working dj)
AFAIK, none of the maudio pci soundcards have ADAT I/O. I once tried to get my EMU1212m working in linux, not because I wanted to use it as a DAW, but because it was the aforementioned dual boot machine with my windows DAW and my monitors were attached. It never worked quite right. These days, I just use HDMI audio for run of the mill audio in my daily linux machine which seems to work quite well.

When you say things like "best to get <specific hardware>", it really reminds me of where other hardware drivers were in the bad old days, when you wanted adaptec scsi cards and an NE2000 to make things work without hassle. This is why I say that Linux is not yet ready, I don't think that it is for the overwhelming majority of users. I'm not going to go back to old-school PCI audio cards with giant stiff DB-25 cables making things difficult to route mechanically, or even worse, a shit-ton of RCA cables dangling around in the dust behind my computer. The last shit that I had like that was an echo gina, great in its time, over the hill now.

I don't mind PCI cards, I still have the EMU1212m in my windows machine, but, it's connected with ADAT, like it should be.

The thing is, unlike network cards and disk drivers, there's very little commercial incentive to support linux for audio work. Network and storage could be leveraged, commercially, by software services, it isn't at all about selling software.

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keyman_sam wrote:... What stops me from eating 40 bananas a day? Nothing. There's no incentive to do either.
I'll pay a dollar per banana.
Free plug-ins for Windows, MacOS and Linux. Xhip Synthesizer v8.0 and Xhip Effects Bundle v6.7.
The coder's credo: We believe our work is neither clever nor difficult; it is done because we thought it would be easy.
Work less; get more done.

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Project management, lack of a proper sampler and a good MIDI-controllable mixer are things that still keep me from switching back.

By project management I mean.. I love the modularity of Linux audio. But it's a pain to handle.* The commercial hosts that are now available all bring in the usual paradigm of a host containing everything related to a project, which obviously works, but it reduces what's possible with the modularity of Jack.

I'd like a proper sampler, something like TX16WX. For drums there's drumkv1 and Drum Gizmo, both of which are good, but still somewhat lacking.

Among the standalone applications, there aren't really any good mixers.


But it's a fine platform, I think. With so called long-term support releases of distributions, they do have much longer lifecycles than, say, any Apple product. With self-contained hosts that ditch some of the underlying modularity, it should be just as good as any other platform.



* The last time I had a somewhat thorough look at Linux as an audio platform was last winter. I enjoyed a lot of what I saw (a lot of nice synthesizers, for example) and liked the updates (I used to use Linux exclusively around 2005-2008, including audio). But looking at project management between programs was once again a PITA. For me, LADISH and whatnot, they just don't work.

But this time around I got seriously side-tracked, I went on and had a look at Python (first 2.7 and then 3.3), learned to make a DHTML-based interface (wrapped with PyQt's Webkit) -- and I got quite far in making a small program that I can use to create project files: read and write files that are essentially shell scripts to be executed in conjunction with snapshots for aj-snapshot.

I marvelled at learning about programming (or scripting to be precise), and even though I'm not finished with that program, I'm fairly certain that the average musician is not going to do anything like that to get a damned project saved and loaded.

edit: misthought.
Last edited by ras.s on Sat Jun 07, 2014 1:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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