Future of Windows in pro audio

[Tiles]

Comparing a niche Linux software provider to a global commercial entity is a false equivalence. Small teams can afford the low-overhead model of Linux support. Massive corporations cannot justify the astronomical QA and maintenance costs required to meet professional standards in such a fragmented ecosystem.

Also, your Logic Pro pun misses the point entirely. Apple's decision is a business strategy (ecosystem lock-in), not a technical limitation. That is exactly my point: software availability is driven by market strategy and economic viability, not just 'willpower' or 'logic'.

You are ignoring the scale of human support. If you have 10 users, you can handle their questions manually. But if you have 10,000 users, the support overhead for a fragmented ecosystem like Linux becomes astronomical. You don't just maintain the code. You need an army of people to help users navigate endless variations in drivers, kernels, and dependencies. Even basic CLI usage is a barrier for many, which adds to the support burden.

A small team can survive on niche-driven support. A large company cannot justify the massive human and technical overhead required to support a mass market on Linux when the ROI isn't there. This isn't "mental gymnastics". It's the reality of scaling a professional product. The Harrison Audio case is proof: when income no longer justifies development and maintenance costs, the product reaches its end of life. That is economic reality. On Linux, the development overhead is simply higher, meaning you need to sell even more copies to break even while dealing with a much smaller market.

You’re arguing from a place of guesswork. I am speaking from professional experience in this field. There is a massive difference between theorizing about how software works and actually managing the costs of keeping it alive in production.

[Largos]

Comparing a niche Linux software provider to a global commercial entity is a false equivalence. Small teams can afford the low-overhead model of Linux support. Massive corporations cannot justify the astronomical QA and maintenance costs required to meet professional standards in such a fragmented ecosystem.

Also, your Logic Pro pun misses the point entirely. Apple's decision is a business strategy (ecosystem lock-in), not a technical limitation. That is exactly my point: software availability is driven by market strategy and economic viability, not just 'willpower' or 'logic'.

You are ignoring the scale of human support. If you have 10 users, you can handle their questions manually. But if you have 10,000 users, the support overhead for a fragmented ecosystem like Linux becomes astronomical. You don't just maintain the code. You need an army of people to help users navigate endless variations in drivers, kernels, and dependencies. Even basic CLI usage is a barrier for many, which adds to the support burden.

A small team can survive on niche-driven support. A large company cannot justify the massive human and technical overhead required to support a mass market on Linux when the ROI isn't there. This isn't "mental gymnastics". It's the reality of scaling a professional product. The Harrison Audio case is proof: when income no longer justifies development and maintenance costs, the product reaches its end of life. That is economic reality. On Linux, the development overhead is simply higher, meaning you need to sell even more copies to break even while dealing with a much smaller market.

You’re arguing from a place of guesswork. I am speaking from professional experience in this field. There is a massive difference between theorizing about how software works and actually managing the costs of keeping it alive in production.

You're overlooking how modern deployment has fundamentally changed the math for large-scale entities. The "army of support staff" needed to navigate drivers and dependencies is a phantom of the past. With Flatpaks, Snaps, and containerization, a corporation doesn’t target "Linux"; they target a single, immutable runtime. If it works on the developer's machine, it works on the user’s machine. If a global entity can’t justify a single containerized QA pipeline, that isn't a failure of the ecosystem—it’s a failure to modernize their CI/CD.

The Valve/Steam Deck Precedent: Valve is a multi-billion dollar entity that successfully brought a "fragmented" ecosystem to a mass-market audience. They didn't do it by hiring a manual support army; they did it through abstraction via Proton and a refined UX that makes the CLI invisible. They proved that when a company stops using "fragmentation" as an excuse and actually builds for the platform, the support burden doesn't scale linearly with the user base.

Blah blah 10,000 users. In reality, Linux users are the most self-sufficient demographic in software. Between community-driven wikis and decentralized troubleshooting, the Tier 1 support for Linux is often handled by the community.

Apple’s move is a market strategy, but that reinforces my point: The "it’s too hard/expensive" argument is often a polite fiction used to mask a preference for closed gardens. There is a major distinction between a platform being "economically unviable" and a platform being "less profitable than a captive audience." Large corporations don't avoid Linux because they can't support it; they avoid it because they can't gatekeep it. Using "QA costs" as a shield for "ecosystem lock-in" is exactly the "mental gymnastics" I’m referring to.

Harrison Audio said they didn't sell any plugins. They were also exposed as selling snake oil crap a while back. I think that explains it more than being a "Linux thing". Linux users are more discerning.

Your un-cited professional experience is a you problem.

[ampetrosillo]

He'll reply with some AI drivel that goes round and round, without truly acknowledging what you have just said.

[Tiles]

Using AI drivel is not part of my programming.

I just knew an ad hominem would follow. And of course more strawmen. At this point I could probably build a house with all of them.

You are yet again confusing technical feasibility with business priority. Actually people did fly to the moon. Does this mean that now everybody has to? Or might it be a bit too pricey for some? Hey, i want the moon to succeed ! So it has to ! Blah blah economics. It's not too hard ! Just look at modern deployment !!!

Different from hobbyists and ideologists, companies don’t support platforms because they can, but because it pays off. That’s the part you keep ignoring hard.

And good joke about the self sufficient community. Made me actually laugh. I would actually call it self insufficient. Fails since 25 years at the desktop for hard igno ... err, "unknown" reasons, but relies at the very same propaganda and forum battles, in hope that THIS time it will work.

If there would just be a tiny grain of truth in this sentence, why do we discuss here now? Just shut up and develop the needed DAW and instruments, much better than Ableton, FL Studio and Logic Pro together! Go mister Kruger, go! Oh wait, what, you can't? Didn't you just say before a second that the Linux community is self sufficient? Well, you could actually ask a developer first. But we all know they are completely clueless when it's about developing.

To be fair, it is a tiny little crazy fraction of the community that brings Linux in discredit.

I've made my point. Several times now. Repeating the same arguments with different buzzwords hasn't change reality, and will not change it. We still miss a ton of software at Linux. And it is not because of a conspiracy.

[Largos]

It is truly a fascinating specimen of cognitive dissonance to witness someone rail against the perceived inadequacies of a community while simultaneously squatting in their digital living room like a displaced gargoyle. Your insistence on lecturing the masses regarding the rudimentary intersection of business priority and market scalability suggests a profound, perhaps pathological, need to be the perceived intellectual superior in a room you ostensibly want to set on fire. To frame the evolution of an open-source ecosystem through the narrow, suffocating lens of corporate quarterly reports is not the "reality check" you imagine it to be; it is merely a confession of a stunted imagination. Your labored metaphors involving lunar expeditions and straw-constructed architecture serve only to highlight the architecture of your own ego—fragile, outdated, and desperately in need of an audience to validate its bitterness. If the Linux desktop is such a spectacular, quarter-century-long failure, one must wonder what that says about your own personal utility, given that you spend your finite time performing this repetitive theater of the absurd for a "tiny, crazy fraction" of people you claim to disregard. By all means, continue your crusade against the "propaganda" of people actually enjoying their workflow; it provides a delightful, if somewhat pathetic, diversion for those of us actually engaged in the productive labor you so loudly claim to champion from the sidelines. Your "point" hasn't been made; it has simply been exhausted, much like anyone unfortunate enough to stumble upon your pedantic rambling.

[Tiles]

Ah yes, the baroque essay approach. When in doubt, inflate the vocabulary until it looks like an argument.

It’s a lot of words to avoid a pretty simple point: markets reward what scales, and right now the desktop Linux ecosystem doesn’t scale in the way commercial software vendors need. Dressing that up as “cognitive dissonance” or “stunted imagination” doesn’t actually address it, it just decorates the dodge.

The gargoyle metaphor is cute, but it cuts both ways. If criticizing something while being present invalidates the criticism, then by that logic nobody in the open source space would ever be allowed to critique anything they use. That’s not how reality works, and it’s definitely not how software improves.

Also, invoking “people enjoying their workflow” as if that’s some kind of trump card is missing the point entirely. Individuals enjoying something and companies deciding to invest millions into supporting it are two completely different layers of reality. Pretending they’re the same is exactly the kind of simplification you’re accusing others of.

And the whole “you must be bitter because you’re here” angle is just tired. By that standard, anyone participating in a discussion must secretly validate the thing they’re arguing about, which would make disagreement impossible by definition.

If you strip away the theatrical phrasing, there’s no counterargument here, just an attempt to psychoanalyze and dismiss. It reads less like a rebuttal and more like an overextended way of saying “I don’t like what you’re saying,” which is fine, but it’s not the intellectual mic drop you seem to think it is.

[ampetrosillo]

Let me approach this from a more philosophical point of view.

You are viewing the Linux world through the lens of proprietary and especially corporate proprietary software. Here, the user is only a consumer. In such a context, the only thing of true value is the consumer's experience.

Compare public and private education institutions. The quality of the tuition is not necessarily different, and in fact, it's often *higher* in public institutions. (In most Italian private higher education institutions, the quality of the tuition is often abysmal). The former's mission is to educate and train the population, and the ultimate goal is to produce experts. Since funding is tax-based, there is a need for efficiency, for both practical and political reasons. This means that the service provided may be bare-bones, on occasion. On the other hand, private institutions are often "such a nice place to be". The institution's purpose is usually to make a profit; for private but not-for-profit institutions, the purpose is to ensure that the institution is self-sustaining. Therefore, students are coddled; the courses themselves are often meant to be "engaging", "entertaining", "enticing". The institution also provides a lot of extra goodies. They might also build a sense of "community", both in the form of networking and in the form of inter-generational attendance.

Does this mean that the student will learn better? Debatable, even doubtful. Maybe the student will have a better chance of getting to the end of the line, because the institution goes out of its way to ensure that the majority of its "customers" is a happy customer. There is some value to this; making students' lives harder for the sake of it does not help a public institution's mission either. Also, the fact that these private institutions tend to attract more affluent students makes it so that their alumni will eventually have a higher chance of achieving a certain form of success. The networking "works better"; their graduates can team up and invest in a start-up, for instance, far more easily than people whose first avenue is salaried work, and those people will have a higher chance of bumping into people with important roles in corporate settings.

At the same time, public institutions do not really compete for students in the same way that private institutions do (although certain unfortunate neo-liberal policies are essentially forcing public institutions to do so, at least to a certain extent). Therefore, they don't have to be "polished"; they don't have to be "captivating". They just have to provide a service.

Free software is not exactly like public education, but similarly to public education, their user is not expected to be a consumer. In fact, users acting like consumers (demanding support, for instance) will have a hard time interfacing with the free software world. And often free software lacks polish, because it doesn't have to compete for users. Does this have a detrimental effect on the user? Sometimes. It can be a barrier. It's particularly true when it comes to creative fields, because the creative user is seldom proficient at using computers. The average creative, especially in the Western world, is, simply put, outright incompetent outside of their very narrow skill set, and often quite impressionable. Often because creatives tend to hail from middle class families, deep in that consumer mindset, who never had to make do with whatever they could get their hands on. (Guitarists not having a clue about how their gear even works? Overpaying for mojo? Sound "engineers" who can't even work their way around a simple passive circuit and chasing "high end gear" that can often be matched by cheap stuff? Graphic designers that panic when their graphic tablet, for some reason, doesn't sync with their computer? DAW users who still think that ProTools sounds better than Reaper?).

Where does this get us? In the Linux world, almost no distro is a product. The very few products that exist are generally intended for corporate settings (such as RHEL), where the end user is probably going to be a developer of some kind or the system is not intended to be "a joy to use" (often locked down systems that are to be used for a very narrow scope of applications). Expecting therefore a world of community efforts, where people are expected to help each other out, to be as polished and "welcoming" as a mainstream commercial OS is, I dare say, idiotic. Also, for individual freelancers whose time is more valuable than the upfront cost of commercial software, having something that "is a joy to use" has value (but that doesn't scale all that well; which is why in the film industry, where a relatively small production can still involve hundreds of people, Linux is actually quite popular).

The fragmentation issues are overblown; there are only a handful of commonly used distros (basically Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, Arch). It's five different OSes, different in subtle ways; that said, again, there are several ways to make things work across distros, and there have been for at least a decade.

[camsr]

Anyone have thoughts on this?

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Mu ... producible

Also, any thoughts on the recent news articles of vulnerabilities? CopyFail and DirtyFrag?

[TechHaus]

Comparing a niche Linux software provider to a global commercial entity is a false equivalence. Small teams can afford the low-overhead model of Linux support. Massive corporations cannot justify the astronomical QA and maintenance costs required to meet professional standards in such a fragmented ecosystem.

Also, your Logic Pro pun misses the point entirely. Apple's decision is a business strategy (ecosystem lock-in), not a technical limitation. That is exactly my point: software availability is driven by market strategy and economic viability, not just 'willpower' or 'logic'.

You are ignoring the scale of human support. If you have 10 users, you can handle their questions manually. But if you have 10,000 users, the support overhead for a fragmented ecosystem like Linux becomes astronomical. You don't just maintain the code. You need an army of people to help users navigate endless variations in drivers, kernels, and dependencies. Even basic CLI usage is a barrier for many, which adds to the support burden.

A small team can survive on niche-driven support. A large company cannot justify the massive human and technical overhead required to support a mass market on Linux when the ROI isn't there. This isn't "mental gymnastics". It's the reality of scaling a professional product. The Harrison Audio case is proof: when income no longer justifies development and maintenance costs, the product reaches its end of life. That is economic reality. On Linux, the development overhead is simply higher, meaning you need to sell even more copies to break even while dealing with a much smaller market.

You’re arguing from a place of guesswork. I am speaking from professional experience in this field. There is a massive difference between theorizing about how software works and actually managing the costs of keeping it alive in production.

I haven't read this whole thread, but aren't all of these European countries ditching Windows and going Linux in their governments?

(not to mention the gamer bros)

[BertKoor]

> aren't all of these European countries ditching Windows and going Linux in their governments?

Correct, they are not. They have IT departments keeping Win9 under control on a thousand desktops.

[Tiles]

I can speak for Germany. We had LiMux in Munich, which failed quite miserably. They eventually switched back to Microsoft.

Currently, one German federal state, Schleswig Holstein, is migrating to open source solutions, which is great, and unfortunately also slowly to Linux, which is not so great. This is introducing many of the same problems LiMux had before.

The situation is somewhat better today than it was during the LiMux era, but it still remains far more complicated and cumbersome than a typical Windows environment. With lots of incompatibilities and frictions.

The rest of the German public administration remains largely a Windows domain.

[TechHaus]

I can speak for Germany. We had LiMux in Munich, which failed quite miserably. They eventually switched back to Microsoft.

Currently, one German federal state, Schleswig Holstein, is migrating to open source solutions, which is great, and unfortunately also slowly to Linux, which is not so great. This is introducing many of the same problems LiMux had before.

The situation is somewhat better today than it was during the LiMux era, but it still remains far more complicated and cumbersome than a typical Windows environment. With lots of incompatibilities and frictions.

The rest of the German public administration remains largely a Windows domain.

So one things you are speaking of is a 2004 initiative, and the other is a 2026 initiative?

Checking in on France.

[Tiles]

Well, we’re indeed basically talking about two serious attempts in Germany over 25 years. That already tells you something about how viable this approach really is in a real-world administration.

As for France and the try to declare the exception to the rule: France is actually one of the stronger examples for Linux and open source in government.

The best known case is the French Gendarmerie, which migrated tens of thousands of systems from Windows to Linux (GendBuntu) over the last ~20 years. They also moved a lot of their office stack to open source (LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.).

The key difference vs. LiMux is that France did this much more gradually and with a highly centralized IT structure. They also rely heavily on web-based internal applications, which reduces desktop dependency issues.

So yes, it works there to a noticeable extent, but mostly because the environment is far more standardized and centrally controlled than in most German administrations. But this comes at a cost:

• high initial migration and training effort, with temporary productivity loss
• compatibility issues with specialist and legacy software (often requiring workarounds or virtualization)
• continued mixed environments instead of a clean Linux-only setup
• shifting dependencies (internal tooling, integrators, Linux ecosystem vendors)
• user friction during transition due to new workflows and tools

So it’s not a “free lunch” there either. The difference is more that France accepted these costs as the price for long-term standardization and control, rather than treating it as a failure like in Munich.

Starting with Linux at all, and then trying to make it work under all circumstances was imho the biggest mistake in LiMux. I criticize this point time and again. Schleswig Holstein is doing it better, they started with the needed software first, but runs now into the same Linux trap again.

Linux does not represent us open-source developers. Linux is also open source. It is not the open source. You can work with open source also on Windows or Mac. And then you can slowly evaluate whether it makes sense to migrate further or eventually move and downgrade to Linux. And it remains a downgrade in many areas, because you cut yourself off from a large part of consumer software.

And France is still very much an exception. It's the LiMux of europe. There isn’t really another European country that has gone this far in practice, for the reasons outlined above.

[audiojunkie]

Anyone have thoughts on this?

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Mu ... producible

Also, any thoughts on the recent news articles of vulnerabilities? CopyFail and DirtyFrag?

My thoughts:

Reproducible builds has been a long time coming, and I've really happy that it is here. I think it has been "past due".

Regarding CopyFail and DirtyFrag--as Linux continues to become more and more popular, it will increasingly become a larger and larger target. This isn't going to change. The nice thing is that Linux patching has been incredibly fast. For example, I am subscribed to several important groups for Fedora (which is my distro of choice). Before CopyFail had even hit the main news channels, the Fedora team had already become aware of it, and the patch for Fedora was available right about the time that CopyFail hit the major news. So, I was already patched by the time the news hit mainstream. That's incredibly fast! I also saw that Debian and Ubuntu had similar patch announcements going out about the same time that Fedora's patch announcement went out. So it looks like Most of the major distros were already on top of things by the time the vulnerability hit the news.

These things will happen to all OSes. No OS is invulnerable from discovered exploits. The key, is how fast the distro is at patching exploits from the moment they are discovered to the moment they are patched. I really feel that Linux is doing a good job with this--as are probably Windows and MacOS.

[Tiles]

Linux was always under attack, as my server logs constantly remind me. It's true though that the Linux desktop itself was not targeted nearly as aggressively for a long time.

The reality is more nuanced. Linux is strong in transparency and rapid technical response. Windows is strong in centralized deployment and update management. macOS is strong because of its tightly controlled vertical ecosystem. Each platform has different security strengths and different weaknesses.