The fundamental problem is that users can buy only computers with Windows preinstalled. For years I have searched for a local advertisement about computer which comes with empty disk, or with Linux preinstalled, or with both Linux and Windows. No luck so far. People does not buy Windows -- it just comes with the computer. Microsoft also dumps down the price of the preinstalled Windows. And birds have told the computer makers get discount on Windows only if it is the only system in the computer. So, you could shorten your text from "start using Linux for serious audio work" to "start using Linux". Strange things happen when one approaches Windows users. Free mostly means ".exe". While Windows users are open-mindedly downloading and running pirated software, they are most closed-minded if they succeed to write anything by theirself. Recent finding are the user-made modifications for the games. They distribute them in very closed-minded and protective manner. For example, there are 30000 mods for Neverwinter Nights at NWVault, but people must download them one by one, manually. Downloading one module requires several mouse button presses per file. That is insane even if one only wants the best mods. Players may have patience but the modders who want a large asset library are doomed because model/item/texture mods comes in large amounts. I decided to not buy NWN nor NWN2 because I would in any case download all mods. Unfortunately I did buy Oblivion; see "tessource.net/files" :-( Imagine if Linux distributions would be downloaded in a similar manner. Any manual downloading is just waste of time. The fun starts after everything has been downloaded and installed. Perhaps GIMP would be downloaded by 90% of users, but most software would be downloaded by 0.3% of users. And people would crack when they realize that they need to download programs ran only by the Linux system itself. Next I will check if all 200,000 CC licensed photos at WikiCommons can be downloaded non-manually. Well, I think already that CC license is a work of Windows people because CC has the no-commercial and the no-derivatives versions. Is CC an attempt to windowize the people? A synonym to ".exe"? The freedom scale is this: PD, BSD, GNU, CC, EXE, $$$ Juhana -- http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-graphics-dev for developers of open source graphics software