Greetings,

I've been reading a lot of negative (read: vitriolic) commentary about the world of Linux audio development and applications. I won't bother to say where, just "the usual places" will have to suffice. Of greater interest to me is the commentary itself - it seems to boil down to the following plaints and lamentations (in no particular order) :

Too many distros.
Too many audio-optimized distros.
Not enough native plugins, esp. instruments.
Inconsistent support for VST/VSTi plugins.
Too many unstable/unfinished applications.
Too many "standards" (esp. wrt plugins).
Poor external/internal session management.
Poor support for certain modes of composition (think Ableton Live).
Lack of support for contemporary hardware.
Confusion re: desktops, and GUI toolkits.
Too difficult to set up audio system.
JACK is a pain.
Too much conflict/fragmentation within the development community.

One could be a professional with/without skills and/or an hobbyist with/without skills, no matter who you are you need apps which doesn't turn sound engineer or a guitar player or composer into a *nix OS student.

The majority of linux audio apps are such a mess to work with for the majority of, let's say, pure musicians which in turn are not interested at all in learning an OS to play music with a usb keyboard throug Qsynth, record things with Ardour, use Guitarix, configure a soundcard, etc etc... that's all.

So IMHO what really sucks is this overall geek approach of LAD vs end users, there is no one to blame for that but nevertheless it prevents lots of people to join.

regards