Does anyone have any experience with another OS than Microsoft or Apple?
I don’t want work-arounds and complicated esoteric programming, but something that just works.
I know (from reading some posts here on the forum) that Linux is a non-starter without a good amount of programming experience.
But how about something like Zorin OS?
Does Dorico take into account that many of their users will not want to switch to Windows 11?
Dorico only runs on Windows and macOS. With any flavor of Linux (like Zorin), you could try using a compatibility layer like Wine, but I don’t know how well it would work. I suspect it would take a lot of elbow grease.
According to Wikipedia:
For desktop computers and laptops, Microsoft Windows has 71%, followed by Apple’s macOS at 16%, unknown operating systems at 8%, desktop Linux at 4%, then Google’s ChromeOS at 2%.
Literally the only reason there is a Mac version of Dorico is because a) there is a disproportionate share of those on a Mac who are music creators, and b) Mac owners tend to spend for software and hardware at a higher rate than Windows users. Neither of those statements are likely true for Linux or Chrome users, so to paraphrase:
Do you take into account the tiny number of users not on Windows?
You can’t expect a business to devote the same number of resources to an operating system that will drive sales at a fraction of the other platforms. If it became cost effective, there is still the time devoted by coders who are conversant in those operating systems.
tldr: Don’t expect this anytime soon.
Perhaps the key would be to lobby QT to see if the platform Dorico uses for transportability can be expanded by that company.
QT supports Linux
That is something from the past. Current Linux distributions are no different anymore from how MacOS or Windows feels and loks like. The days where you needed to compile everything yourself are long gone.
If you want to recompile the Linux kernel you still can do it, but as a standard user you just install and use it.
That is one Linux distribution, based on another one named Ubuntu. I don’t know what the difference really is, I would look for distributions that are optimized for Audio production like Ubuntu Studio for example.
As @Barry_Ford wrote QT is available on Linux, but @dspreadbury already explained in a different thread some time ago, the important piece is the audio engine. This is shared with Cubase, so that needs to be ported first.
Not only that, but we would need the sample library providers to produce libraries in a suitable format, and the audio interface hardware manufacturers to provide suitable drivers. This all started to happen with BeOS, but it didn’t gain traction.
It seems to me with the Mac/Windows duopoly, and the ever-increasing enshitification of Windows, we have reached an inflection point similar to that that led Dave Smith, in collaboration with Yamaha, Roland, Korg, Kawai and probably many others, to come up with the MIDI standard. I, for one, welcome our MusOS (or is it Musix? I like the sound of that!) overlords.
Zorin is essentially a build of Ubuntu Linux. They seems to have done a lot of work to make it ‘user friendly’ – but don’t underestimate how much knowledge you already have of your current OS, and that you’ll have to start again, learning how everything works. (Take changing notation apps as an analog..!)
Does anyone have numbers for that? What is the problem with Windows 11? Ironically, there are discontents saying they’ll never use MacOS 26, either.
Sort of saying the same thing, but Macs have a much higher presence in first-world, “personal-use” computers. All the millions of Windows computers used in offices and other applications, like warehouse stock control, are irrelevant to Dorico’s market. (I remember once seeing the inside of an ATM cash machine, and there was a standard Dell? PC box inside it, running Windows. Whether that counts as “desktop share”, I’ve no idea.)
Zorin has been my daily driver for several years now, and my Roland TriCapture works perfectly on it, being class compliant. REAPER should work on it, but having retired from a career in hardware and software development, I’m not motivated to go down that path at the moment!
True, but you can’t not compare the learning curve for the OS to what is needed to switch from Finale to Dorico, for example. The UI of several of these Linux distributions behave like Windows or MacOS, depending on what you chose, making it easy to switch.
You clearly do not need to learn the inside of a distribution anymore.
The behavior of Microsoft and the aggresive way of putting more and more useless stuff into the OS (like Copilot or forcing to create a Microsoft Account, etc.). Windows 11, as it is at the moment, is ok for me. It works silently without any real issues.
It is not just MacOS, in my case, it is the complete Apple universe that I stay away from (I was a Apple user for many years, starting in the area of PowerPC CPUs). I do not want to be forced to buy expensive hardware every five to six years, especially not if I can’t upgrade the memory or disc as I like.
This assumption is not correct.
I’ve had a long career in the IT industry and I know that there are large amounts of companies that use Apple devices instead of PCs, all of these are irrelevant for Dorico. One of the biggest user of Apple devices is IBM (> 290k as of 2019) and they are not the only ones.
These so called Content Creators and many in the Design and Graphics industry use Apple devices, again not relevant for Dorico.
No it doesn’t.
I’m basically in the same situation as @Barry_Ford, retired from software development (my last hardware development project was end of the 80s) and I’m fine with how it is at the moment.
A qualified “agree” - though setting up midi/audio can still be a challenge for those of us with limited tech skills.
We have a couple of old notebooks that run linux quite speedily and if there was a Dorico on linux option, I’d happily abandon Windows forever on our desktops (for all the reasons you make).
Meh… all the things you might hate about Windows 11, I’m either okay with, or ambivalent about. You may consider additions like Copilot as “enshittification”, but I see them as useful in the right situations. And if you don’t like it, you can turn it off. I have zero ads or bloatware with my current installations, as I did them both myself from a clean install.
If you think you can get away from AI just by choosing another OS, wait a minute. It’s coming to all of them whether you like it or not. I’m not fond of “AI everything” as most of it is pointless, but it’s still coming. And if your chosen OS refuses to have it, there will come a time it will be necessary, and you’ll have to choose one of the more compliant OSs.
There is even the possibility no one, besides hobbyists, will own their own PC in the near future, with everyone using stripped-down boxes that run their OS in the cloud. It will come as a result of the coming bursting of the AI bubble, which most AI haters are cheering for. Little do they know…
What’s wrong with Win11? I’d never want to go back to Win10!
Same here.
Windows 11 is, on average, about 15% slower than Windows 10, and Linux is often faster than either.
I bought a Mac mini for music production and am setting up / evaluating a freebsd machine for everything non-music related.
I evaluated Ubuntu Studio, but too much of my commercial plugin library didn’t work properly. It would be nice if some of the bigger music software houses would work with Valve to use Proton for music software.
Bitwig, Reaper and Musescore have Linux native options. If I was starting out today I’d use Linux with Musescore and Reaper for composition/production. (I end up exporting MIDI from Dorico to DAW for final render now anyhow.) For synths, Vital and Surge are Linux native, and there’s a package, I think drumr, that is a plugin wrapper for Hydrogen drum kits. Reaper has a notation editor, but the last time I tried it wasn’t expressive enough for me.
Measuring what, exactly? Do you have a source for this?
I think I was suckered as I was unable to verify something from the source I saw.
I reverted to Windows 10 because at least two features I routinely used were deprecated.
When my Windows machine died I decided I was done with them. Not that I find Apple much better, but it’s the only other choice for music software I paid good money for.
Just curious: which features?
Moving the menu bar and groups in the start menu.