chaocrator wrote:
in so called reality, things never happen this way even in commercial OSes & ecosystems.
they may work out of the box, if one is lucky enough. but also may not work. and some degree of fiddling with software settings before it works as expected is always present.
Perhaps, but it is waaay closer to being plug and play in commercial OSes. I came to Linux from the Apple world. In that reality, it was easier for me to get set up and working in Protools and Reason under OS9 than it is for me today to make music using Linux, and that was
more than 15 years ago. Same when I moved to OSX on a different machine. No config files, no needing to research kernels or anything like JACK or patching things together from unmaintained documentation. It WAS easy to just make music. Maybe it is harder now. I don't know, but I have a lot of musician friends who just buy a computer and start making music without having to go through what Linux users do.
After I switched to Linux in 2005, it took me years of failed attempts to even get close to the latencies I was getting in OS9, even with superior hardware. And then when I could get it working at all, it was buggy, and the Linux DAWs ten years ago were not so great, and everything I wanted to try took hours of research and often failed.
Fast forward to today: Ardour and Qtractor rock! There's also Mixbus and Tracktion and Bitwig to compete with! We have Guitarix and so many amazing open and closed plugins and synths at a point of maturity! And KXStudio makes set-up waaaay easier for those of us who are not super-technical people. There has been HUGE progress across the entire ecosystem in terms of usability.
I am just hoping that we can keep moving forward. The community of developers is amazing, but it is small, and some/many projects are just one person. If there is a new job, or a baby, or health concerns, there is no guarantee that someone else will step in. Sometimes people say they will and then they disappear. Yes, this is a risk in commercial stuff too (all of life is risk), but it is mitigated when there are more people involved. I know most people here probably don't care about getting new users, but it is one way to move forward and grow things. I just think the way that could be done is through a distro that comes pre set-up to make it easy for curious musicians to try.
Apologies if this is ranty, I do worry about things moving backward or being abandoned after all the positive things this community has accomplished.