You guys know what I think about this, but I am gonna restate it again.
It's really from the early 2000s that each desktop operating system under the sun started becoming capable of sustaining professional audio workloads. That's it. If one looks at the technical aspects there is not difference whatsoever between properly configured operating systems running on compatible hardware. This is also largely due to the fact that computers are pretty damn fast nowadays.
If ones wants to push stability to the highest limit (and does not want to involve an IT guy to take care of the machines in a recording studio) the solution for big companies is a dedicated workstation. These cost at least few k$. What do they run? Up to something like 10 years ago, often a BeOS of some kind. BeOS was the only operating system designed for multimedia, and it is its own thing. Not even UNIX based. Now, for perhaps tons of reasons, BeOS is being dropped in favour of other things. For example, Windows. This is the choice
iZ made, for example. The
RADAR V (2005) was running a BeOS system at release. Now,
they adopted an optimized Windows 8.1 for their products. These dedicated workstations are fairly often used in major recording studios, concert halls and theatres. Running a high performance machine was very important 10-15 years ago since an all purpose computer + all purpose OS was not enough in many situations. Nowadays the hardware has so high performances that also desktop OSes can do the job.
Now, I think that the point was "people think that only Mac exists and trash talk about other stuff". Well, a lot of people do believe that. I think it all spawns from the fact that in the past Apple made some hardware choices that resulted in very high image colour fidelity. Since then people have in mind the equation Mac = multimedia OS, even if today Mac runs on very standard hardware (and even if that did not have much to do with audio at all). Truth is that Macs are really no better and when professional, high fidelity audio was involved, for a very significant part of recent history, the best choice was actually an operating system that had nothing to do with either Mac, Linux or Windows.
It is worth to notice that Linux is not discarded at all in big multimedia productions. Do you know computer animated movies?
A big number of them were produced using Linux. When thinking about audio only, I think that Linux is an outsider just because it does not run ProTools. The fact is that very often different publishers and engineers need to work on sessions. For some reason ProTools become the standard professional DAW and now, if you want to be able to work with commercial partners, you perhaps need a working ProTools box. On the other hand, standard-of-industry 3D graphics software runs on Linux (see
Maya for example).
In this realm, audio, there isn't a reason to prefer an operating system over another. If you need to run a server there are tons of technical reasons to choose Linux/BSD/Unix, but not for audio or graphics. When there aren't technical reasons what is left is whether or not that OS can run the standard-of-industry software. When this happens (3D graphics) Linux is taken into consideration. When not (audio) not so much.
And about people that do think there is a real best multimedia OS (or a worst one), if you are in the mood, ask them whether they are time travelling from the mid 90s and run BeOS.
I am getting used to type too much don't I...
