On 03/05/2011 03:02 PM, Thomas Vecchione wrote:
On 3/5/11, david<gnome@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Learning ANYTHING is an investment. It's up to you to decide what you
want to learn. If you don't want to learn something new, then stick with
your previous way of doing it so you don't have to learn anything new,
and quit complaining that something new doesn't work the same way you're
used to.
Once again, the original question that came up in this thread was "How
can we evangelize Linux as an option to those people being left out in
the cold by the discontinuation of PTLE?"
You hit the nail on the head and the entire reasoning behind this
discussion and what I and others have been trying to explain here.
"Learning ANYTHING is an investment". That is why user-friendly makes
a difference, as the less time spent learning something, the more
sense your investment makes, and the greater ROI. So if you have to
spend two weeks learning a new OS and how to get it to work and do
basic things you could already do in 15 minutes on your existing
solution, why would you switch exactly? You will be forced to throw
out your investment in plugins you can't run on Linux, you will have
to spend two weeks invested in learning a new system instead of making
money on your current solution, and to most people you will be
continually tweaking the system afterwards for a larger investment of
time(This cause/rationale I touched on above, and don't really feel
like it is valid, but that is the outside opinion certainly).
So when saying that something can't be user friendly, we are
essentially giving one more reason not to come to Linux.
I tend to agree with Seablade and Kim Cascone.
It's time to make the next step and to not (heavily) defend Linux(audio)
by automatism anymore, but start to listening and to see what other OS
are doing better then Linux. In a general discussion, every criticism on
Linux(audio) is mostly countered by a statement which says why that
criticism is false. This is probably somewhat logical cause we are a
minority, we love our OS and we heavily involved in it most of the time
(via time and/ or via our beliefs about freedom) and we see the strong
points of it (which others don't see most of the time). But this strong
defensive behavior makes it hard to see the real picture often and it is
often not according the reality.
I do agree that there is a distinction between a consumer tool and a
professional tool and that the latter needs more investment to learn.
But you can't argue that you need to invest if that investment is due to
the fact that a GUI is clumsy or that tools have annoying little bugs,
which make producing music time consuming or does need developer
knowledge to solve. This isn't acknowledged often in the Linux(audio)
world. A musician wants to make music, and don't want to waste it's
precious time on finding it's way trough the GUI or searching for work
around for annoying bugs. On other OSs this situation is sometimes
better then on Linux. Tools are (not occasionally) more intuitive and
more production ready.
Some tools on Linux are just made to solve a problem, for one or a few
persons. Other tools are aiming to serve a larger group of musicians and
like their software to be used by those musicians. The latter group
should take criticism on workflow and comments on user friendliness
seriously. I believe they are doing that, but I tend to feel that things
are seen from a technical / developer perspective often. The perspective
of a user/ musician is different sometimes and maybe we have to learn to
see that and take it more serious imo.
There are projects who are trying to improve the interfaces of
opensource tools. Iirc someone on LAU or LAD pointed to a conference
about it a while ago. Also I do remember a scientific project that did
research on the GUI of GIMP.
That's being said, let's not forget the strong points of Linuxaudio. One
example: a pipeline comparable with the openoctave.org project, with a
huge amount of Gig files and more then 100 MIDI and audio tracks, would
be much harder to accomplish on Windows and probably also on OSX, not to
mention the extra $$ you have to pay (constantly) for it...
Best,
\r
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