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

[Ken Restivo]

On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 04:55:56PM -0400, Rob wrote:
> 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.  

What was it you were trying to do?

> 
> 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