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. 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 _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
