Getting organized

Discuss how to promote using FLOSS to make music.

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briandc
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Getting organized

Post by briandc »

Discussing Linux and FOSS on other forums, I've returned to a thought I had a while back, which is:

In order to make Linux more "solid," wouldn't it be good for some of the (hundreds of) distros to join forces?

I've tried out about 20 different distros (I even broke a CPU, poor thing..) in the last year. And I saw that some were faster than others, some were made more adaptive to new hardware (I'm thinking of a USB headset that I bought to circumvent a mic jack problem on my laptop: on that computer it worked fine; on another it wasn't recognized).

There's so much going on today in the Linux community, that I think if some of these distros joined together in one larger project, it would result in a more "bulletproof" OS, and more people who are used to Windows/Mac would be convinced to move over to Linux.

I was just looking at the ffado.org website (first time). There, like here, there are people doing lots of very good work to make Linux work flawlessly with modern technology. Maybe instead of new distros, we need more people collaborating on things like driver compatibilities, etc, so that new users encounter fewer hurdles.

What'd ya all think?

brian
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karm
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Re: Getting organized

Post by karm »

I think that it is easy to create an organisation compared to mantain one. People have to talk to each other, to listen to each other and to find consensus, there are ones who decide and ones who obey. This is very difficult and needs a lot of patience and good will. I think it is impossible, just look at the conversations on this forum. There are a lot of people who have only their ego's in mind and argue about unimportant things like if the software written by one guy is the king of the samplers or not. After some posts the author took offence and removed his app from the net. He could just accept the fact that somebody disagree and move on but he didn't. This is just one example. Moreover, there are lots of organisations already in existence, standards ready to use etc. Creating another ones is clueless IMHO, that's why I stick with existing ones (I mean Ubuntu and KXStudio) and I will support these projects. I think this is the way to go: support existing projects instead of creating new ones which just duplicates the job that is already done.
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Re: Getting organized

Post by raboof »

briandc wrote:In order to make Linux more "solid," wouldn't it be good for some of the (hundreds of) distros to join forces?

I was just looking at the ffado.org website (first time). There, like here, there are people doing lots of very good work to make Linux work flawlessly with modern technology. Maybe instead of new distros, we need more people collaborating on things like driver compatibilities, etc, so that new users encounter fewer hurdles.
There's already more collaboration than you might think. Essentially, all that distro's do is package up software (like the kernel and FFADO), but that software is mostly developed in a distribution-agnostic way. Also, packages from Debian automatically also make it into Ubuntu without much extra effort.

I agree we probably don't need more distro's. I'm not sure where we need more collaboration. We need people working on driver compatibilities, but this is already being done at the kernel/lib level, mostly not at the distro level.
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Re: Getting organized

Post by briandc »

Thanks for the replies, guys!

Yes, we have so many distros already; some work better than others.

But there are areas where more effort is needed. On another thread here I read that DSP technology isn't supported in Linux (or at least in some cases).
This is maybe an example of where effort should be put, in order to allow DSP users to feel more at home with open source systems.

If some teams joined together, rather than dividing into different distros, they would spend less time on the distro itself, and more time on compatibility issues, thereby making linux more "solid."

brian
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Re: Getting organized

Post by autostatic »

briandc wrote:But there are areas where more effort is needed. On another thread here I read that DSP technology isn't supported in Linux (or at least in some cases).
This is maybe an example of where effort should be put, in order to allow DSP users to feel more at home with open source systems.
Imo this is pointless, as long as the manufacturers of those DSP cards do not free any specs or documentation it comes down to reverse engineering. And reverse engineering is in a lot of cases just not worth all the time and effort.
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Re: Getting organized

Post by briandc »

AutoStatic wrote:Imo this is pointless, as long as the manufacturers of those DSP cards do not free any specs or documentation it comes down to reverse engineering. And reverse engineering is in a lot of cases just not worth all the time and effort.
--That's just my ignorance showing again! :D
I guess I just meant that maybe more attention should be focused on where the "linux side" of an interface can be improved in order to host the hardware better.

I've gotten several responses from people in other forums, saying that they've tried linux but had better luck with what they use in Windows (Pro Tools, for example). Sometimes it might just be laziness or "if it's not broken don't fix it"-type mentality, or maybe sometimes there's a compatibility issue that could be resolved, thereby making Linux more appealing to newbies.
I've recently tested a free version of Soundplug in FeSTige, and it works almost flawlessly. I haven't tried Kontakt 5 (free version) yet, since it downloads as an .exe file, and I'm having much better results with .dll files..

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Re: Getting organized

Post by briandc »

Speaking of DSP... you guys seen this?

http://www.linuxdsp.co.uk/download/lv2/ ... index.html

brian
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Re: Getting organized

Post by briandc »

falkTX wrote:
briandc wrote:Speaking of DSP... you guys seen this?

http://www.linuxdsp.co.uk/download/lv2/ ... index.html

brian
wow, nicely spotted!
my rss feed of linuxdsp didn't report anything, nor did I heard about this new plugin ever before... :?

kinda nice that I was going to update the linuxdsp plugin collection for kxstudio this week, haha.



PS: I guess that plugin is so new that the page itself is not even finished! (the image link gives a 404)
Thanks.. ;)
I found it here: http://bedroomproducersblog.com/2012/08 ... -your-daw/

His comment surprised me: "I’m sure this is the first Linux-only freebie featured in BPB’s news section.."

--As if Linux-only apps are usually not free! :roll:

I also wrote an email to KVRaudio asking them to indicate on their VSTs for Windows that they can also run in Linux. No one's written back. -Yet.

brian
Have your PC your way: use linux!
My sound synthesis biome: http://www.linuxsynths.com
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