What audio interface latencies do you get when using Bitwig on a Linux distro? Let’s say with 44.1 or 48kHz. In other words: Is it the same as on Windows or MacOS? Better? Worse?
I’d be up for a Linux version once they’ve addressed all the feature requests that’ve been pending for over a decade.
I’m not a Linux fan or whatever, but performance issues with Windows and Cubase forced me to perform a lot of tweaks and I’m still not satisfied. I wish I could have performance system out of the box. From my experience I see that it’s not hard to find a distro which uses less than half of the resources that Windows use on the same hardware.
If I were a Steinberg executive I’d be asking:
- how big is the potential market?
- What growth do we see in the Linux market?
- How technically and financially stable an environment is Linux?
- Can we use our existing development tools?
- What is the cost of the initial conversion effort?
- What is the extra cost of ongoing development and testing for each new release?
- What are the risks to the integrity and quality of our software?
- Would supporting Linux limit the functionality we might want to develop for Windows and MacOS?
- How costly are Linux developers?
None of these are technical questions, really. I expect these questions have been asked….
Some of these questions are not technical per se, but most of them get technical quite quickly to arrive at sufficient answers for a project manager to determine viability to the company of such an endeavor.
As an engineering manager, questions about development tools, engineering staff requirements, and testing would be major decision points. Engineering discussions about how well existing software is partitioned to isolate OS issues would also be a major issue.
Of course, the first hurdle would simply be the answer to the marketing issues: what is the target market, would resulting sales justify initial cost/benefit results, etc. Licensing models of the underlying Linux distro might enter into the picture, so legal would also have to assess impacts on proprietary software.
I have no issues with people wishing for Linux support, but getting a little testy about what others know, or do not know, about Linux and whether “Linux” is the kernel or a reference to the entire package of utilities is a bit offensive and off-topic as to whether this would be a viable commercial product.
As a discussion, of course, all inputs (most anyway) should be welcomed. However, general comments about people you don’t know and their grasp of the technical issues seems a bit presumptuous.
This post/forum is was intended about Cubase, as the title say’s “Why Cubase Should Go Native On Linux” while others with strange comments saying “what comes first? A usable desktop linux or nuclear fusion?’ is just as offensive than me trying to explain that Linux is a open source with a Unix base just like MacOS X is based on Unix as well. Differences is MacOS is closed sourced and of course are worlds apart in terms of functionality.
Anyway, While I appreciate different perspectives, some replies have strayed into a lot of unrelated to this post and even go as far as saying “This isn’t about Cubase” which comes off as disconnecting others to this post and scraping it due to me being blunt and doing my best to explain how other companies that are much smaller than Steinberg have Linux working on any distro of choice. That being said, Others saying “Windows and Mac are the winners, just face it. And which of the many distros of linux should they support? There are too many to count.” lack evidence or context. Could they provide examples or data to back this up? Without that, its hard to see how it relates to Cubase or contributes to the discussion.”
For instance, this forum was meant to reflect how other smaller DAW that are usable on Windows & Mac that are paid ones as mentioned so many times now, Studio One, and Bitwig. many users here that have used Linux shared specifics about low latency and RME support on Linux and there desktop runs stable on a customized linux desktop.
Let’s keep the conversation productive and focused on Cubase having a possibility to go native on Linux as as other companies made it possible, I believe Steinberg eventually can make it a reality eventually, They are the pioneers of VST.
Had you actually read the previous posts, you would have seen that the comment “This isn’t about Cubase,” and the recommendation for it to be moved to The Lounge, was because there is no universe in which SB releases only “Cubase for Linux.” They must release all products for some Linux distro, or at an absolute minimum, Cubase and Nuendo. The other reason was so that MORE PEOPLE COULD CONTRIBUTE to the thread if anyone actually thinks there’s some chance this will happen.
Before you create a new account so that you can post to these threads, you should really take a few minutes and actually read what was said before you take snippets out of context and misrepresent what was actually posted.
This is about resources: not enough people (wisely) use desktop linux for music production to justify the added expenditure by Yamaha/Steinberg, way more likely than not.
I think what we need is an official statement from Steinberg as to whether they will support linux in the future. I haven’t seen this, so maybe it exists.
BTW…another product I use is Synthesizer V from Dreamtronics and they just dropped support for linux with their version 2. Like Cubase it only natively runs on Mac and Windows. So you see allot of complaints in their forum about this.
I wouldn’t advise this. If they make a statement about such a thing they will get endlessly nagged about status and schedule. It’s better to just do it behind the scenes and drop it on the community when it’s ready. But please Steinberg, don’t waste your resources on something no one (in large scale) is asking for.
Good point. I was actually thinking they should put out a statement that they will not support linux and finally put an end to it. But i guess that may not be smart either.
Personally i think Cubase is far too complex a software now, to port to a new platform where users will be happy with it. It would take enormous effort that could be used elsewhere.
Totally, totally agree: it’s a giant hornet’s nest, Linux. If Steinberg can’t get VST3 properly isolated such that errant, ornery plugins can no longer scuttle the whole DAW in a flash in various & sundry ways, it’s completely irresponsible to try & port it to Linux considering the distro-smear of esoteric badness.
Or something.
Just don’t do it, Steiny. Not until you can fully stabilize and get it properly performant on Mac & Windows, at the very least.
Then they’ll promptly make VST3 obsolete, and move on to 4 where it once again takes a while for devs to learn how to do 4?
I think VST3 was very likely a significant contributor to Markus Krause’s divorce & burnout with Tone2… his (correct) rants about how difficult it was to do simple stuff like MIDI learn were legendary. Even Urs Heckmann (who was not a pal of Markus’ after a certain IP allegation) pretty much said the same thing: that MIDI binding, for example, was taking forever with VST3 due to the massively increased complexity over VST2.4. And I remember how long it took, too!
There’s a logical explanation to that. Steinberg did not want to hosts creating MIDI bindings to VST plugin parameters directly. I assume they think it makes sense for there to be a layer of abstraction in between. It’s basically a design philosophy choice. One that I know several plugin designers using Steinberg’s SDKs were opposed to.
Would they? The current VST3 SDK is very mature and modular. Adding compiler instructions for one more platform is not as big of a task as you might think.
I don’t know. Not to pick on Steinberg and VST…it’s software in general.
It just seems to be a thing with anything computer related. They ‘improve’ one thing, add something ‘new’ (that it takes 10 years for developers to bother with) and something else that worked for over a decade simply stops working.
Every time I get a device, learn to use it, and am thrilled with its efficiency and productivity, it gets ‘broken’ by updates. Even the most basic of things, like google docs on a hand-held. Works great for a while, then one day out of the blue, it doesn’t. No way to ‘roll back’ unless you’re a guru with rogue apk sites and stuff. Spend a week trying to figure that out or buy a new device?
I’ve spent the last eight hours trying to get SampleTank 4’s clusterfck of folders sorted such that Cubase will open my project that was working fine yesterday again. Such a nightmare: I can’t even get into my project to unload SampleTank in the meantime! I can’t use a backup project because this is one of the earliest instruments I used in it.
Why, oh WHY don’t we have the option to sandbox plugins in Cubase like BitWig, already? There’s no way I can sit around all weekend, AGAIN, and reinstall TOTAL STUDIO MAX V5 ULTRA MEGA IK DING DONG UPGRADE ME I’M ONLY $199 from scratch. I simply can’t.
So, this is the only thing I can do: try to retrace my steps.
I’m so tired.
I’m too tired to even respond to your (tired, frankly) arguments, Brian. I don’t even wanna argue. I just want these companies to stop releasing SHODDY, BROKEN products and leaving them for us to beta test for years and years and years. It’s truly unethical.
This industry needs to be REGULATED. Where’s the European Consumer Centres Network when you need them?
I haven’t ‘argued’ with anybody in this thread. I made a comment about things being ‘obsoleted’ about the time people finally figure it out and start using all the features and abilities of the ‘last version’.
I expressed similar frustration to yours, but in the simplified form of a very BASIC app like Google Docs.