a good OS for content creation

[tatch]

http://arstechnica.com/information-tech ... te-os-1-0/

It'd be neat if some of these ideas were to eventually find their way into KXStudio or another media distro.

main points:

-Good image, PDF, and video codec support out of the box

-Advanced hardware support in the OS, resolution independence, and expanded driver control

-Latest implementation and good optimization of OpenGL drivers

-Good compilers

-Pen tablet support directly in the OS

-OS customizability, logging, system output, and monitoring tools

-Search everywhere, clear-text content indexing, and expanded metadata handling

-Intuitive methods of dealing with visual content and flexible inter-application workflows

-OS-wide scripting support

-Downtime reduction tools: Flexible ghosting and backup

(I just ripped the titles of each section from the article. Some of them aren't entirely descriptive so it's a good idea to read the article in its entirety before making assumptions about the section titles.)

[tatch]

I just ripped the titles of each section from the article, so some of them aren't entirely descriptive.

software patents and closed-source drivers exist and will not go away.

true, this was mentioned in the article.

-Good image, PDF, and video codec support out of the box

any linux OS can properly read many file formats out of the box. writing is a different matter...
the common issue here is software patents though.

True. The article also praises linux for the ease with which it locates codecs that need to be installed. It also mentions pro codec support OTB, though that may be a patent issue as well (not openexr though). Some people in the comments also cited ease-of-use things such as apple's quicklook.

-Latest implementation and good optimization of OpenGL drivers

nvidia is usually a good choice here. linux driver support has been getting better since Steam, but still not great.

the article mentions that linux actually has the best opengl implementation, which is neat.

-Good compilers

I don't think this is an issue.
gcc and clang are quite good.

yes, I was just including this because it was one of the section titles.

-Pen tablet support directly in the OS

no idea about this...

In linux it's been getting better but is still lacking, e.g. my pen tablet works for the most part, but the buttons on the tablet don't.

-Search everywhere, clear-text content indexing, and expanded metadata handling

KDE nepomuk has a lot of this stuff, but honestly I disable it completely in KXStudio to save resources.

Maybe it needs to get better, because it seems like OS X has it enabled always and it doesn't seem like it suffers much from it.

Here's a comment from an ars user:

Regarding indexing and metadata on Linux, Nepomuk and Strigi on the KDE side are actually pretty compelling. Nepomuk was heavily funded by the European Union and occasionally surfaces in KDE in interesting ways. Unfortunately, it's not really supported pervasively enough across desktop environments to actually be useful for most users. Tracker, which is ostensibly exposing some of those capabilities in GNOME, is pretty bad in practice and hasn't really lived up to the potential that its advocates have promised.

Reading more about nepomuk, it looks like it's actually desktop-independent for the most part. I'm not sure how it all works, but apparently unity/gnome use zeitgeist and tracker which are somehow related to the nepomuk framework.

-Intuitive methods of dealing with visual content and flexible inter-application workflows

JACK is the best example of inter-application workflow, although only for audio.
I'm not sure what this point is all about though, shouldn't it be 2 separate ones?

You should read the article for a more thorough explanation of this. I believe the workflows he's talking about are more about how multiple applications that are all open are presented on the screen.

Based on what you said, it seems as though KDE may be working towards some of the things this article likes about OS X. I have only used KDE rather briefly and occasionally but based on my experiences with it and with OS X, which I've been using rather regularly for the past month (particularly in regards to music creation; much of my impression of OS X may very well just be from Live), it still has a ways to go.