[LAU] A year of Linux Audio revisited - would like to know your oppinion

[Rob]

On Tuesday 11 December 2007 00:54, Robert Persson wrote:
> important features. Therefore it just isn't true that LMMS can do
> the kind of job that FL Studio can do, yet it seems that many
> people in the Linux audio world think that it is. There is a lot of
> this kind of over-optimism within the Linux audio world and this is
> dangerous because it can lead to complacency. Developers need to

Longtime Linux users do sometimes get complacent because they think 
some Linux application has reached the state of the art, when 
meanwhile the state of the art has moved on.  How many years was it 
that people were holding up Tux Racer with its 1995 graphics as an 
example of how Linux could compete as a gaming OS?  (And it was a 
great game that didn't deserve to be called something it wasn't.)  
How often have you heard "Oh, don't bother trying to get Visio 
working under Wine, because Dia is better anyway?"  

Telling people that kind of stuff and having them switch to Linux -- 
which takes probably more effort than a lifelong Unix nerd trying to 
switch to Windows -- and be disappointed, is far worse than 
saying "Yeah, we have some programs that are sort of like Visio, but 
nothing with the same variety of stencils and templates for network 
management" and letting them try it with more realistic expectations.  

But when it comes to Linux audio in particular, I think things have 
been moving faster in the last couple of years, not settling into 
complacency.  

I have some of the same complaints as you (Rosegarden won't let me 
manipulate note data as flexibly as the shovelware Windows 3.1 
sequencer that came with my sound card 12 years ago; it takes hours 
for me just to get Jack and the ALSA sequencer, my MIDI keyboard and 
my desired client programs working together, let alone LASH, and by 
then I've run out of time to compose or record, and the next time I 
can look forward to going through the exact same ordeal) but I do see 
forward progress here every week, if not every day.  And a couple 
years ago I wouldn't have even dreamed of trying an audio-oriented 
live Linux CD, if any of the current ones even existed then.  (No 
offense intended to whomever was working on Agnula/Demudi/Rehmudi, 
but none of them really filled me with much confidence.)  While the 
whole free-software-CC-licensed-music culture is still a drop in the 
bucket, it's a bigger drop.

I was still far more productive musically in Windows 98 or even 95 
than I am in Linux, but then, I had a lot more free time in those 
days.  At least some of it was probably just a matter of familiarity 
and staying in practice.  There are definitely gaps, and the "many 
little programs that you have to connect together" philosophy that 
works so well on the command line is utterly baffling to me in the 
GUI, but I feel pretty confident that once I make it up the learning 
curve I might end up being more productive someday.  Even if I have 
to write my own .rg batch processor in perl or something.

And yes, after all these years, "suspend to RAM" is still largely 
broken.  I feel pretty lucky that "suspend to disk" works on my 
laptop and have probably become a little complacent about how my 
notebook works under Linux versus how it would have worked under XP.  
Maybe a lot of people making music with Linux are just making do 
because they can't afford the 2 or 3 grand involved in getting a 
decent Mac notebook and the commercial software required to make 
music at a level beyond GarageBand, but the truth is, much of the 
music I've heard here is pretty uncompromising.

Rob