Dorico on Linux?

This reminds me of the endless discussion about Affinity for Linux that goes back to 2014 – without any change of opinion from the developers.

… and there’s the great Cubase for Linux debate that’s been running for years.
(typos corrected)

That isn’t where Linux lives in the computing ecosystem.

Linux’s market share of supercomputer operating systems is close to 100% (in fact it is exactly 100% of the 500 top-rated supercomputing systems on the market). And its share of the internet server market is more than 90%. Neither of which have much relevance for Steinberg!

The tiny share of the home PC market seems to be mainly people who have philosophical objections to the existence of large corporations, and/or who take the view that software should somehow be “free.”

Ironic that those with an aversion to large corporations would opt for the same OS used by those very businesses. :laughing:

Well, there’s where they can agree on something; neither likes paying for software :stuck_out_tongue:

Can we get Steinberg to port InDesign and Photoshop to Linux? Or maybe Adobe can port Dorico to Linux and while at it, Android.

You know what, let’s have Microsoft port the eLicenser to Linux! Imagine how much simpler our lives would become if we could just link all our licences to our Microsoft account. Of course we’d have to be logged in to use Dorico… :smiling_imp:

Big businesses who run Linux don’t get it “free”. They buy it as a package with an expensive support contract. For example ask yourself where a Linux distributer like Red Hat gets it $3 billion a year revenues from and why it has more than 10,000 employees. You don’t need that size of operation to provide downloads to a few individuals who want to run “free software” on their home PC.

If you can afford millions of dollars for the computer hardware you need to run your business (an “entry level” Cray supercomputer has a price tag of around $0.5m, and the top of the range price is more than $100m) you can afford to pay somebody to support the software!

I do not have any problems paying for software since I truly honour the efforts of people working full time creating awesome software like the Dorico team. For me, it’s all about greed and privacy concerning MS and Apple and the lack of sensitivity in the US-american politics and society about these topics. In Germany, to be honest, it’s only gradually better, but even some politicians are regarding developments closely and there is a public debate about them. Obviously not at Steinberg, though.

Of course, you will never stop technical evolution, what can be done, will be done. But there is still time to discuss in which direction it will lead us (Amy Webb, The Big Nine). I am totally aware of the ongoing and decades old discussion in respect of Cubase, and I am glad I do not depend on using Dorico for all times to come. Hopefully it will work with a VM or perhaps Sibelius, Finale or SCORE will do, for that matter. But I am not totally hopeless regarding Steinberg since the misuse of private data with Microsoft and Apple began just a few years ago and perhaps someone will think things over.

@Derrek, you argue totally in my favour since what you write is exactly to the point: why do you think large software corporations use Linux for their own companies, why they let their children not have any smartphones or prefer Waldorf schools for their kids? Because they know their own systems inside out…

@Dan: The topic is one year old, jeffrags just joined four years ago :wink:

@rubberfingers: Android is based on Linux :wink::wink:

Oy vey. I’ll remember not to make jokes on this forum in the future.

I was responding to Derrek’s post more than yours. It doesn’t seem obvious whether his reference to irony was a joke, or just misinformation. After all, Linux with no support for personal use is pretty much “free” in the literal sense of the word.

Incidentally, I first learned Unix back in the 1980s by logging on interactively to a Cray-2 and figuring it out for myself from the online manual. But even your cellphone now has more memory and a faster processer than a supercomputer had back then.

Ah, fair enough (though I promise I did consider “this is definitely a response to my post and no one else’s, right? right?? right.” :laughing: ).

I’ll remember not to be so touchy on this forum in the future :wink:

If I could get a complete Scoring and DAW suite running under linux at the quality and feature sets of Dorico/Cubase/Nuendo, I’d never need, nor want Windows, nor Mac again.

As for the idea that Musicians aren’t really part of the academic and commercial worlds with a lot of server, analyst, and ‘scientific’ needs…I cry foul.

Imagine something like Nudity qualitative analysis software, but for musical scores :wink:

Imagine tools to easily/quickly build music courses for things like Moodle without having to do 99% of by hand, in 17 different apps.

We do want and need them. The lack of them with the relative tweaks and features required for music analysis and collaboration is one of the reasons it’s one of the slowest moving (and ever shrinking) academic fields on the planet. In some areas, centuries behind every other academic research field on the planet.

We’re pretty much forced to run 3 OSes, and none of them quite do everything we need. There are dozens of companies and products competing for the same users, to do pretty much the same duplicative tasks; meanwhile, massive frontiers of potential music software needs go neglected. (someone said there is no market for it…hmmm…they also decided it should be doubly difficult for independent students without budgets for expensive compilers and dev kits to jump into the fray of contributing useful bits of code for the oddball things music field researchers want, but there is no ‘market’ to develop for).

I was a Mac user for six years before being forced by Apple to change my computer in mid-2017, since the last upgrades of the OS were “too much” for my 2011 Mac Mini (which worked perfectly fine till then). After returning to the last functional OS version (Yosemite, I believe), eventually the last updates of almost every imaginable program (say Firefox, etc.) required a newer version of the OS, so I indeed had to decide what to do about that issue (at the same time my iPhone became super slow, so it definitely had to do with intentional programmed obsolescence, for which Apple had to pay a fine later). The fact that I felt I was being forced to buy a new computer and iPhone made me lose confidence in Apple. Since 2014 I was a Sibelius user. I bought an Asus and continued using Sibelius on that machine.

Windows 10 was ok at the beggining, but it’s filled with updates that occur in the middle of work, updates that occur after restarting, updates that don’t get deleted after installing newer ones filling up your entire hard drive (I have an SSD drive on that machine, with 128Gb of space… By the end I had, after removing everything imaginable, only 5Gb left). The Wi-fi is often not recognized, the printer takes a long while to start printing the first page (I even had to select between several identical printers that were automatically installed), at least once I had to experience the malefic blue screen of death, etc. Battery time is quite optimistic on Windows, telling you that the battery is low only seconds before actually shutting down (although it shows 8 minutes remaining).

That machine needed eventually this year a new battery (normal after three years of use) and cleaning. While I left it in the shop I used for those days my old Mac Mini that I couldn’t use anymore where I installed Ubuntu 18.04. to see if I could do stuff on that computer on those days. And boy I could. That computer is old but still functional with linux. Many years ago, before buying that Mac Mini I was dual booting Windows and Ubuntu. My last impression of Ubuntu was from 2011. Ubuntu nowadays has had massive improvements. With the theme of the 20.04. version, the desktop has a very attractive visual design and I can change everything to my taste. Menus are easy to navigate and files are easy to find. Everything worked out of the box. There is way more commercial software for linux than in 2011. Several DAWs like Bitwig (which looks gorgeous and works very well) have a commercial version for linux. Other than in Windows I could activate real-time audio processing for use with Soundjack and Sagora (and other pandemic related software for real time audio exchange). Softmaker Office has a professional Office Suite for all OSs including Linux. Needless to say, I’m very impressed.

When my laptop came back from the shop. I turned it on and the new battery worked (I could tell it did because I could turn it on :wink: ). But the first thing that made me remember the Windows 10 pain: no Wi-Fi. The solution for that has been normally to turn it on and off several times, pray, reboot, etc. But I was having a blast with Ubuntu for the last days. So I gave it a try with a USB stick. It worked! Wi-fi, printer with no lagging and no duplicated names, everything!

I installed Ubuntu in that machine as well. My composition tasks (I’m in the middle of writing a concerto for viola) are now done in the only professional notation software available for linux: lilypond. It has a beautiful output but structuring your project and learning to work efficiently with it is very challenging (but rewarding). That software has also made tremendous improvements over the last 9 years. So I was left basically Sibelius-less by Apple and Microsoft and imagining going back to Apple or to Microsoft after all that is difficult, especially since Canonical et al. do a better job nowadays. Whatever the reason is for not doing a linux version of Dorico, I think it would be nice that that subject is reviewed once in a while. For now I enjoy watching your YouTube videos where you explain how Dorico works. If there’s ever a linux version, I guess at least I’ll know a bit of how it works already.

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Sorry, but Windows 10 pro doesn’t have any of those problems. If you were using Windows 10 home, that is a bit like complaining that Dorico Elements doesn’t have as much functionality as Dorico Pro.

What Martin really needs is to convince someone to write a Qt interpreter for Linux :laughing: ; it should not be up to Dorico to do a Linux work-around the Qt framework.

Qt does work on Unix systems. The big issue is that the software needs to be compiled specifically for every flavor. So either the distributor has to maintain a whole number of slightly different build processes or the end users need to compile the software themselves. The former is not realistically possible unless you have a lot of resources; and the latter is of course impossible for closed-source software.

It’s great that it works so well for you. I don’t think I ever said that Windows Home was not functional enough (I have no idea what “flavor” it was to be honest). I just told my own experience. I’m sure other people have had only good experiences with it (also with Mac).

One of the things that I’ve never understood about Linux is what the difference is between the distributions. Is it just a different assortment of software, or is the same binary on one distribution different and incompatible with that on another? Plus the whole KDE/GNOME thing.

That sounds quite difficult indeed. I don’t quite understand why so many open source applications find their way through basically every operating system with virtually no budget, but making the same for some commercial software is “impossible”. I haven’t had to compile anything myself (and I’m almost sure that Frescobaldi and MuseScore both use QT). I really don’t know (don’t care) how many of the stuff I use uses QT.

On the other hand I wonder how QT combines with the “snap” technology, which aims precisely at solving this kind of distro problems. Certainly providing a snap or a Flatpak or an AppImage should be enough nowadays. Dorico could include its own QT libraries in the snap. I don’t see why that wouldn’t work.