Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not against supporting Linux. I just presently consider it more realistic to realize it doesn’t come easy, and it’s not cheap or easy to go there. How much market demand is there to make it a viable goal at this time?
There is still a considerable problem of the licensing systems for a considerable number of popular software products not working under Linux. If one can get it working at all, they still need to pretty much install windows, or portions of it somewhere to run in the background or something. Essentially, you’re still ‘running Windows’. So what’s the point?
I’m aware this can change. Companies start supporting Linux distros with their licensing schema; but until then, it’s a show stopper for a lot of people. Be they pros with a back room full of system engineers, or a midnight hobbyist trying to make a slow laptop track a few grooves.
The definition of working well obviously depends upon whom you ask.
For the average consumer that just wants to build a small home studio or lab, plug in a small number of mics and instruments, at a budget of under 5k, a mid to upper range PC or Mac is usually more than enough to get productive right out of the gate.
It’s true that bad products sometimes don’t work well when plugged in, were never optimized, have poor support, etc. It’s true that with Windows, or any other OS, there’s never any utopia.
On your latency issue, I’ve had multiple systems sitting side by side, with similar specs, running current versions Windows. Same interface connected, and it performs better on one system than the other. Is that the fault of the OS? Maybe, but then again, it could be a zillion and seven matters in the system design and bios that the OS has little control over.
The OS cannot detect and fix every issue within a PC build. It can’t fix a motherboard design, and to date nobody makes an OS that can detect and fix bios or microcode issues surrounding the hardware itself.
Such things can and will happen under any OS.
From a purely anecdotal perspective:
I’m on Windows 11, but I can still use an ancient pair of Delta 1010s on modern hardware. They perform as well today as they ever did (despite being older stuff, they’re more capable than I need, I still have ‘headroom’). Those things came out back in the XP era! Out of the box, I add a $30 PCI<>PCIE bridge and they work right away with standard windows audio drivers, and adding their ASIO bits and interfacing software is still not a problem.
Over in Linux, I can kind of get a Delta card working, but it’s a major PITA, and I still can’t get a pair of them to sync up and work together like a single interface. In Windows, it’s a process of only a few steps.
I can still plug in a Phantom XR for USB MIDI and run the Editor software that came out for it back in the stone ages. I did have to hack the drivers, but that’s not Windows fault. Roland chose to design ‘installers’ that won’t work beyond Windows 7. The drivers themselves, though ‘unsigned’, still work fine since I found a way to bypass the installer, administer permission for the unsigned driver to hook up with the kernel, and manually set up the drivers. It is true that I can’t get the Sample X software working on modern Windows since they’ve stripped out a bunch of stuff regarding SCSI<>ATAPI protocols for optical disks. While I ‘might’ have better luck imaging something like an old Roland S CD Rom (odd formatting), I still cannot run the Sample X software on any modern OS.
Over in Linux, there is absolutely no hope of getting MIDI over USB with a Roland Fantom of that era. I cannot run the editor software. I can still use stuff like that over a DIN interface, but the fact remains my experience with this device under Windows 11 is 10,000 times better than anything I can under linux, or any non PPC Mac OS.
Have I had ‘issues’ with music software under Windows?
Of course I have! Thing is, it’s very rare that the crux of the problem came from the OS. It came from the hardware itself, the bios, the stuff plugged into it, and the drivers involved.
Yes, I’ve recently had issues with things MIDI since Microsoft finally decided to undertake an overhaul of the MIDI services. Early on I even needed to roll back to older services for a couple of months. Still, MIDI 2.0 didn’t give them much choice to start working on and rolling out new MIDI service releases, as the newer standards force them to go in and redo things from the ground up. Seeing as there are literally tens of thousands of MIDI products and bits of software out there, the probability of releases with no issues going out is extremely low. Presently, it’s now working better than ever before, and with features and additions people have been requesting for a long time now. Even better things for MIDI support and routing are on the way.
Things like this can and will happen with any OS. Whatever services control MIDI under Linux can involve issues, choices, adaptation of new standard while trying to maintain ‘legacy support’, and the list goes on.
While I’ve experienced growing pains with Windows as the world advances into the realms of MIDI 2.0, I can positively state that in my anecdotal experiences I’ve had a much harder time getting things MIDI and audio to work in Linux distros ‘period’. Android is even WORSE.
Does Linux support MIDI 2.0 at all thus far? If so, is it really trouncing Windows and Mac in usability and performance?
Of the few DAW systems built around Linux, is the performance really that much better than anything for Windows or Mac? Do the sacrifices and costs associated with going that route justify the trouble? If you could already just sync up a couple of lower cost, older devices to achieve the same results, what is the immediate benefit of moving to something that might be slightly more efficient, but offers far fewer immediate benifits?
)
