danboid wrote:
ghettosynth:
I think many would disagree with you about Linux not being usable for audio on a daily basis - certainly Bitwig, Harrison, Tracktion and everyone over at Linuxmusicians would say otherwise.
I usually run Debian or Ubuntu and I can't remember the last time I had any upgrading issues. Thats one of the reasons I use these distros as I know this isn't the case for some other more experimental / rolling-release or rpm based distros.
I'm not sure what C/R is?
I didn't ask anyone else, you asked us, so I don't give two shits who disagrees with me. I'm certain that you don't have any MOTU drivers for the six or so MOTU products that I have so I'm pretty damn sure that neither you or anyone over at LinuxAudioWhatever.com can make linux useful for me as a daily driver. Let me know when you've got some MOTU drivers, ok?
As I said, it's not ready. Bitwig supports it, so what? They are trying to capture market share and they started from ground zero in an era where Linux support for audio apps is finally at least practical. That will not help all of the other devs who have years entrenched in windows/mac and do not want to support another platform.
JanCivil told you point blank that Cubase is a deal breaker. I've told you that MOTU is a deal breaker. Neither one of us is particularly afraid of technology. I'm sure that the vast majority of users on this site have some deal breaker that they depend on. Most musicians, however, ARE afraid of technology and are simply not interested in mucking about with Linux. In my opinion, there is at least another ten year cycle before you will see this change dramatically. It will take a lot of time before people tire of their existing interfaces that are not class compliant and have no choice to move to something that is. Linux will have to make more inroads onto the desktop in other markets first. The effort a few years ago to save some cost by selling cheap machines with linux as web machines failed miserably. Both Microsoft and Apple rose to the challenge and I doubt that we'll see much difference now.
It's a strategic decision to support linux and except for a few "early adopters" like Bitwig and friends, it will take years for Linux to be supported in a mainstream sense. That's EXACTLY what I mean by it being NOT READY TODAY!
C/R is challenge/response. If you haven't run into upgrading issues then your use of linux must be fairly mainstream. I was forced to upgrade recently because the latest version of R wasn't supported on the release of Mint that I was using and there was no non-trivial way to run certain packages that I needed to run. This happens a lot with open source and, in general, it's recommended to reformat rather than just upgrade in place. Upgrade in place has worked often, but it's not without issues and the more obscure stuff that you use the more likely it is to break something.
When something breaks, you'd better be comfortable with the command line because that's almost always how you fix things.
If you use Ubuntu then you know that they are on a six month release cycle so this means upgrading your system every six months. There is no way in hell that I would upgrade that often for an audio system or even consider dealing with C/R re-auth every six months should the upgrade break my authentication. As it is I use LTS variants of Mint and still run into issues more often than I would like. Compared to Windows and OS/X, which I just install and leave alone pretty much until the OS is no longer supported, this time is measure in years, generally. OS/X here is more annoying than Windows in this regard.
Bitwig is C/R, I'm not going to install them on a linux system today because it is simply not as stable as Windows/OS/X. I don't mean stability in terms of reliability, I mean in terms of the system installation as discussed above.
Don't get me wrong, I love linux. You can wrestle "sudo apt-get install my-favorite-package" out of my cold dead hands for work. But what makes linux great is the open source nature of the beast and I would not in any way want to give that up for work, i.e. make Linux more mainstream, just to run audio apps. In short, I don't' care about Linux being mainstream, it's great as it is. I don't want a bunch of standalone installers, I hate that, they often break shit. We had this a lot back in the slackware days.
So, for me, what it comes down to is that I like the Open Source dominance in Linux and to the extent that I want audio to succeed there it's in an open source sense. So, no, I'm not really motivated to push for linux support in plugins.