[LAU] OT Rant: When will people stop comparing Windows/Linux apps?

[Rob]

On Sunday 11 July 2010 07:51, Andrew C wrote:
> Honestly, when will people stop going 'Oh this windows app doesn't work
>  in linux, so I won't bother looking for native alternatives etc etc'.

When the alternatives are in the same league, it'll die down some, but 
people are always advocating for their chosen platform over others even 
when they're equally well-suited for the task at hand.  

It's disingenuous to cast them as not bothering to look for native Linux 
alternatives when the best apps we have would require pretty major rewrites 
to do certain things that have become a standard part of the workflow of 
people who are used to pirating software instead of using free software.

>  They're two completely different OSes, last time I checked! Heck, even
>  Mac OS X has more in common with linux than windows does, and I'm not
>  seeing people going 'Why can't I run Ableton on this Mac? Ugh it sucks
>  big time, I won't bother with it!'.

Um... people don't say "Why can't I run Ableton on this Mac" because you 
can buy Ableton for the Mac.  But Ableton is a perfect example of an app 
for some of whose biggest selling points there's no viable Linux 
equivalent.  

I spent a couple days bouncing my last track back and forth in Ardour, 
Audacity, LMMS and Rosegarden with a pile of different plugins and hours of 
reading my archive of this list and googling other people's techniques to 
do the same thing that literally took a friend half an hour to do in 
Ableton, and I'll continue to do so because I haven't run Windows since 
2002, have never owned a Mac, don't pirate software (I figure people who 
have contributed money to the EFF will be the first ones to get their 
laptops searched at airports when ACTA gets ratified) and couldn't afford 
Ableton anyway.  

But it's quixotic at best to imagine someone who is currently taking half 
an hour to do something on their existing platform to switch to a platform 
that takes orders of magnitude longer to do the same thing just because the 
OS sucks less and is free.  Not everyone switches to Linux for music out of 
some Stallmanesque ideological purity; in fact, very, very few do.  Those 
most likely to switch are the ones who like what challenging software 
brings out in their music, like how I'm more interested in writing games 
for the Atari 2600 than for modern platforms despite never having owned an 
Atari until the last decade, or who have other computing priorities that 
have to take precedence over music, as I do.

Rob