On Sunday 11 July 2010 07:51, Andrew C wrote:
> Honestly, when will people stop going 'Oh this windows app doesn't work
> in linux, so I won't bother looking for native alternatives etc etc'.
When the alternatives are in the same league, it'll die down some, but
people are always advocating for their chosen platform over others even
when they're equally well-suited for the task at hand.
It's disingenuous to cast them as not bothering to look for native Linux
alternatives when the best apps we have would require pretty major rewrites
to do certain things that have become a standard part of the workflow of
people who are used to pirating software instead of using free software.
> They're two completely different OSes, last time I checked! Heck, even
> Mac OS X has more in common with linux than windows does, and I'm not
> seeing people going 'Why can't I run Ableton on this Mac? Ugh it sucks
> big time, I won't bother with it!'.
Um... people don't say "Why can't I run Ableton on this Mac" because you
can buy Ableton for the Mac. But Ableton is a perfect example of an app
for some of whose biggest selling points there's no viable Linux
equivalent.
I spent a couple days bouncing my last track back and forth in Ardour,
Audacity, LMMS and Rosegarden with a pile of different plugins and hours of
reading my archive of this list and googling other people's techniques to
do the same thing that literally took a friend half an hour to do in
Ableton, and I'll continue to do so because I haven't run Windows since
2002, have never owned a Mac, don't pirate software (I figure people who
have contributed money to the EFF will be the first ones to get their
laptops searched at airports when ACTA gets ratified) and couldn't afford
Ableton anyway.
But it's quixotic at best to imagine someone who is currently taking half
an hour to do something on their existing platform to switch to a platform
that takes orders of magnitude longer to do the same thing just because the
OS sucks less and is free. Not everyone switches to Linux for music out of
some Stallmanesque ideological purity; in fact, very, very few do. Those
most likely to switch are the ones who like what challenging software
brings out in their music, like how I'm more interested in writing games
for the Atari 2600 than for modern platforms despite never having owned an
Atari until the last decade, or who have other computing priorities that
have to take precedence over music, as I do.
Rob
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Received on Mon Jul 12 00:15:05 2010
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