It appears that there is a usual rich variety of opinions on this matter, which pretty much reflects the general state of the Linux scene (for better or worse). What follows is an *incredibly* long rant. Please do not take this against me--I simply feel very strongly about this matter and as such FWIW I feel compelled to share my thoughts with you. Having used many different WMs over the years and eventually settling for KDE which I used exclusively until very recently, I now prefer Gnome simply because I am tired of endless customizations. I simply want things to look moderately appealing out-of-box without having to mess with them too much (perhaps not having an ability to customize too much in the first place was the needed catalyst to prevent me from wasting my precious time on endless tweaking of my desktop experience ;-). Yes, Gnome does have its own share of stupid limitations and on top of that in many places looks inconsistent and/or incomplete, but for me (as subjective as this sounds) it does what I want it to do today. Call me a sucker for eye-candy or simply someone who prefers to have well-rounded user experience. But the way I see it is that I can always open a console full-screen, which more often than not I do (all right, not in full-screen, but definitely in a window ;-), yet if the rest of the UI sucks, then advocating Rat Poison et al is usually seen (at least from the outside) as a poor attempt at rationalizing current deficiencies of the Linux desktop rather than a choice made on a level playing field. Add to this the fact that we live in a predominantly oculocentric culture (at least the Western culture, including its ubiquitous sphere of influence), and you'll quickly realize that no matter how good the backend of a framework is, most "users" (and that still includes a vast majority of artists) will opt for the UI which looks prettier, even if that is at the expense of usability. This means that WMs and Linux audio are inseparable whether you like it or not. So, what of it? FWIW, I think Linux audio will remain a research/enthusiast platform no matter how cool tools end-up being produced by the LAD community, as long as we'll have incompatibilities (Robin mentioned one feature that both XP and OSX are ahead in, and that is a drag-n-drop feature) and inconsistencies plaguing the desktop experience, and perhaps more importantly fragmentation due to endless pursuit of new approaches to existing solutions (i.e. how much energy has been already wasted on redundant sound servers?). Add to that the current dubious state of GTK+, whose potential demise, regardless whether you like this toolkit or not and/or whether such demise is imminent, will bring about tremendous overhead upon us as well (think how many different audio apps rely upon this framework and if it becomes obsolete how much time will it take to port something like Ardour to a different toolkit). I might be simply getting older and thus more conservative. Back when I started using Linux, I probably would've found Rat Poison the coolest concept on the planet. Today, I am a mouse/UI junkie who finds Rat Poison et al to be a noteworthy experiment, with my hope and attention turned almost exclusively on AIGLX and Xgl. But with this newfound conservative outlook on technology and supporting philosophy of GNU/Linux, I am beginning to believe that this endless choice (anarchy?) of solutions and/or options inherent to our platform/doctrine of choice, as wondrous as it is, is now beyond its zenith. I see us now speeding along on a downhill path with several generations of enthusiasts/programmers/hackers who have gotten burned out by this endless pursuit of superfluous yet for the most part incomplete solutions (whose incompleteness was often a byproduct of our resources, namely manpower, being spread too thin). The irony of this situation is that, just like in the cutthroat corporate market, in part due to resulting saturation not every time the best technology has prevailed (think JACK and desktop sound servers). So, now we have incomplete Gnome desktop (at least IMHO), over-customizable KDE desktop (again IMHO), bunch of other WMs all of which have their advantages and drawbacks, but more importantly most of which are so foreign to a common user that their mainstream adoption seems very unlikely, dubious future of GTK+ upon which a volume of audio apps depend, and overall a fragmented community and resources. Is it possible to unite the army of volunteers to focus their cumulative energy on a unified framework even if that offends some, simply because their preferred toolkit was not chosen for this purpose (can you imagine all WM developers focusing their energy on one singular WM--now that would be a miracle!)? Does the community have the courage to make that decision within our community and take the plunge (of course many lingering questions remain, i.e. who will be granted the jurisdiction to make such a decision on behalf of the community, as well as many other logistical and/or authority-based nightmares)? Can the community learn from the successes of the companies and/or non-profit organizations who have ventured in the world of open source and turned profitable, or if not profitable, then at least leaders in their respective domains? IMHO all of those entities have shown a strong sense of focus and direction which ultimately empowered them to maintain the course and brave the narrow path of success. My hope is that one day the community will reach such a consensus, although a volume of history suggests unfortunately otherwise. To offer you some perspective on this one, consider LADSPA plugin framework. I might be spreading total FUD here, and if so, please do correct me as it is not my intention to offend. My understanding is that LADSPA was implemented as a GUI-less standard to offer flexibility for developers, to some extent end-users, and perhaps also to attract developers from other platforms. Yet, in retrospect, of all the apps that have resorted to using LADSPA, we've probably encountered no more than 3-4 different toolkits being utilized for the LADSPA gui (with GTK+ and Qt being two predominant options). Needless to mention that reaching out to other platforms has resulted in very little return (again, please correct me if I am wrong). Although I am aware that it is easy to sell wisdom now that it has been all said and done, FWIW wouldn't it have been better to simply bite the bullet and endorse a single toolkit (perhaps also making sure that it is open-source and cross-platform to minimize restrictions in its adoption, even though I personally do not care much for cross-platform capability since that has not gotten us much of anything even after all these years of dealing with the additional overhead due to such architectural decisions)? This way, today we would have had at least a small contingent of LADSPA plugins which would have looked as cool if not cooler than today's VSTs, AUs, etc. IMHO, we would've been much better off, at least as far as the widespread adoption of the Linux audio is concerned. But, as I already said, I am very much aware that selling wisdom after the fact is cheap. However, what I hope can be learned from this is that perhaps now is a new chance to revisit this issue and try to use this as a catalyst for a discussion whose purpose would be to agree within our little community what will be endorsed across the board, so that at least drag-n-drop, midi files, DAW session files, etc., are compatible across different apps. We could simply do a study of all available options and settle for that one which seems to have the greatest longevity potential and go from there... I am sure that some will feel an urge to reply to this rant with an "I don't care about wider adoption, I only care about how Linux affects my own work." And I say, all the power to you for making what is IMHO the right *personal* decision. Yet, whether I like it or not, the power is in the numbers, and Linux as an audio platform will only persist if there is support for audio hardware, and if there are software packages which will continue to be maintained. All this is a lot easier if there are more of us. So whether I like it or not, I am convinced that the success of Linux audio by and large resides in the widespread adoption. At any rate, time to shut up and go back to work... FWIW, I have no intentions on giving up on Linux audio, for as long as I am able to run it. I am simply hoping that my rant (apart from wasting everyone's bandwidth and for those few brave souls who opt for reading this long e-mail, for wasting their time) may at least get us to start thinking about these challenges (or perhaps should I say opportunities?). Best wishes, Ico
