When searching around for solutions existing in the Linux world to make music on PC basis I have to conclude:
To me it looks more and more like many Linux programmers didn't learn the essential insight to cooperate. Many projects I found did never catch interest by more than only few people at all and... a few of even these few interested people are developers... making most projects die very quickly.
A new attempt I see around is the one which tries to circumvent 'classical Linux packaging systems in order to make projects able to run on many different distributions... allegedly at least. But the disappointing truth I found i: There have already been very powerful and versatile ways to make this possible (like "AppImage" - statically linked software, hence containing all the dependencies otherwise needed to be installed as "dependencies" in a modular organized system like Linus simply is), so I have to state, that these attempts (I speak of flatpak and snap) are nothing but new attempts to undergo the (open available!) packaged systems and making users depend on very few corporate solutions instead of a big community (in this case: Flathub and Canonical) making use of the "laziness" of a majority of users.
In other words: For me Flathub and Canonical (and a few others, of course, but these two) seem to be made to 'disassemble' mostly Debian and its (packaging) system (look, which packaging systems are 'bypassed' mostly by snap and flatpak...) and ... together with other companies they try to establish a Windows-like relationship of users vs. software suppliers.
But that's not my actual 'problem'... this is more the simple fact, that Linux still is a geek project in many aspects. A lot of projects never become real community-driven projects, because (at least almost) no effort is taken to care for broad development and even more a healthy user-development communication, which is essential, because almost all the programmers are no users - at least no average users - and so this feedback of users is essential to get a program usable for an average community.
But both - cooperation in development and keeping a healthy and versatile feedback - still don't work in a lot of Linux projects. Because of the anyway 'small' community of music producers such project work made in Linux even more become purely randomly successful, because all these weakening factors add up to ... the visible mess.
Currently I'm faced with software companies making use of a (at least according to my recherche) quite unreliable concept (which - what a surprise - even itself "recommends" to make use of flatpak installations, what has turned out to be nonsense, because drivers not available aren't available in flatpak either...![:roll:]( "Rolling Eyes")
)... I talk of VULKAN (used by Studio One and Bitwig Studio), a graphical driver concept, which (also according to my investigations) seems to "make things possible" the "dirty way" of circumventing standardized solutions... becoming an obscure pseudo-solution in a very Windows-like manner and - again - becoming a very single-source-dependency and another kind of monopoly "solution".
On the other hand technology concepts like Ardour or JACK also seem to move only marginally towards current technological trend and seem to be far behind the technological state of the art... but the same time seem to "feel comfortable" at this "ancient technological state".
So I really can't avoid to reflect... "how long will it need to really see a fully competitive music production environment not depending on one or a very small number of companies in Linux?".
I am gradually beginning to doubt that I will even live to see this point in time.....![:(]( "Sad")
(btw... I'm almost 60 yrs)
To me it looks more and more like many Linux programmers didn't learn the essential insight to cooperate. Many projects I found did never catch interest by more than only few people at all and... a few of even these few interested people are developers... making most projects die very quickly.
A new attempt I see around is the one which tries to circumvent 'classical Linux packaging systems in order to make projects able to run on many different distributions... allegedly at least. But the disappointing truth I found i: There have already been very powerful and versatile ways to make this possible (like "AppImage" - statically linked software, hence containing all the dependencies otherwise needed to be installed as "dependencies" in a modular organized system like Linus simply is), so I have to state, that these attempts (I speak of flatpak and snap) are nothing but new attempts to undergo the (open available!) packaged systems and making users depend on very few corporate solutions instead of a big community (in this case: Flathub and Canonical) making use of the "laziness" of a majority of users.
In other words: For me Flathub and Canonical (and a few others, of course, but these two) seem to be made to 'disassemble' mostly Debian and its (packaging) system (look, which packaging systems are 'bypassed' mostly by snap and flatpak...) and ... together with other companies they try to establish a Windows-like relationship of users vs. software suppliers.
But that's not my actual 'problem'... this is more the simple fact, that Linux still is a geek project in many aspects. A lot of projects never become real community-driven projects, because (at least almost) no effort is taken to care for broad development and even more a healthy user-development communication, which is essential, because almost all the programmers are no users - at least no average users - and so this feedback of users is essential to get a program usable for an average community.
But both - cooperation in development and keeping a healthy and versatile feedback - still don't work in a lot of Linux projects. Because of the anyway 'small' community of music producers such project work made in Linux even more become purely randomly successful, because all these weakening factors add up to ... the visible mess.
Currently I'm faced with software companies making use of a (at least according to my recherche) quite unreliable concept (which - what a surprise - even itself "recommends" to make use of flatpak installations, what has turned out to be nonsense, because drivers not available aren't available in flatpak either...
)... I talk of VULKAN (used by Studio One and Bitwig Studio), a graphical driver concept, which (also according to my investigations) seems to "make things possible" the "dirty way" of circumventing standardized solutions... becoming an obscure pseudo-solution in a very Windows-like manner and - again - becoming a very single-source-dependency and another kind of monopoly "solution".On the other hand technology concepts like Ardour or JACK also seem to move only marginally towards current technological trend and seem to be far behind the technological state of the art... but the same time seem to "feel comfortable" at this "ancient technological state".
So I really can't avoid to reflect... "how long will it need to really see a fully competitive music production environment not depending on one or a very small number of companies in Linux?".
I am gradually beginning to doubt that I will even live to see this point in time.....
(btw... I'm almost 60 yrs)Statistics: Posted by kurt008 — Sat Jun 15, 2024 12:35 am — Replies 0 — Views 25