On 2004-12-27, Ranando King wrote:
Let's be perfectly honest here. All Linux distros have exactly 3 weaknesses:
1. A lack of decent, fully functional, audio content creation tools
(Talbot's complaint)
There is at least one distribution that is completely dedicated to this
task, and at least one of them boots from a live CD and runs Rosegarden.
I don't know of any other system that can make this particular boast. I
sure as hell haven't seen a bootable CD that, alone, can take a machine
from NO OS, to running Cubase. Yeah, I know Rosegarden isn't Cubase.
That's not my point. There is audio software for Linux, and some of it
is quite good. It needs your help. If you don't want to help, just
walk away. You don't really need to criticize it. It didn't bite you
or steal your lollipop. And it's not going to go away, or even diminish
in popularity just because you don't care for it. (Not so much directed
at you, as at the troll, pointless as that may be).
2. A lack of driver support for some cheap and/or relatively uncommon pieces
of harware (mosly because of companies being "tight-lipped" about supporting
linux)
Somehow, this has gotten much better in the past year or so. Echo/Event
devices, RME/Digi devices, etc., have ALSA drivers.
I'm still looking for a substitute on the Audio Editing and
Filtering end.
I'm not so much "looking for a substitute", as "anticipating something
revolutionary that makes Windows programs obsolete." To me, that would
really be a necessary and sufficient condition to say "this platform was
truly, inherently superior."
I think this will happen when some consumer device is pressed into
service in some clever way that it's designer did not intend. Some
game console that happens to have 24-bit audio and digital video
capabilities, let's say. I'm not imaginative enough to predict the
future. But I do believe that Windows, stuck on the Wintel platform,
will be left in the dust as soon as the hardware is something else.
Apple won't port MacOS to anything else, but Linux will be there the
next day. That will make Linux the first OS to the marketplace on some
next generation of hardware. It will be accepted, it's by no means an
immature technology. Think about it.
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