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Jack itself isn't a Linux technology, as it can be run on other unixes and both Windows and OSX.

Try using it for anything non trivial on either of those platforms, and you will see very nasty limitations. I have a friend who uses OS X and after porting a synth he particularly wanted that was jack only for him, discovered that the os x native midi stuff couldn't be fed to jack midi by any easy method. There goes all real utility for anything midi related.

It was designed for linux, and os x and windows are an afterthought since linux stuff likes to be portable in general anyway.

I actually don't care much for latency problems, but they seem to be a recurring issue with Linux kernel, so I'd be conservative when declaring it "fixed".

My audio subsystem has been running with 6msec latency for the last three years, so I'd pretty much consider it fixed..

if you have specialized hardware, you'll have driver problems.

What specific hardware are you talking about? While I personally have only a limited amount of odd hardware (which worked out of the box) I've helped set up people with more esoteric setups and have yet to find anything that doesn't work. Most people only tend to use the custom hardware for multiple high quality audio inputs and just use an s/pdif interface at 96khz/24bit as a single output source, having all the mixing done on pc and s/pdif going to their receiver etc of choice.

Maybe Latex works fine (I have very little experience with it), but does a Latex WYSWIG editor works well with that many pages? And how about database integration? I don't know if Word dies at 20k pages (never tried past 15k), but I've used some linux-compatible alternatives (such as OO) that won't even get close to that number.

When you are writing with that many pages, you are in general writing something that will become a rather large book or reference material, typesetting matters (it does so even in small documents too). MS word is horrible at typesetting (not as bad as it used to be, but still pretty nasty) and is not used to typeset books for a reason.

Also the use of latex allows people to focus on the content of their writing, as opposed to the formatting, it separates the two in such a way that later on you can adjust it if you so wish without having to go through the entire massive document.

An overview of a few of the advantages of latex.

In short, with large document writing you really don't want wysiwyg, it tends to destroy consistency and limit typesetting ability.

Please name one big-budget movie that was edited with Cinelerra. Have you actually ever tried to use it? I had, and it is so far behind the curve that is more of a fancy transcoding tool than a non-linear video editor. You probably would be better trying to do video editing with Windows Movie Maker than with Cinelerra.

In hindsight I was thinking of another linux video related item and not cinelerra, so I'll concede on this one. Last time I used it was in 2005 or so, and while I agree it was pretty nasty back then I had assumed it had progressed in some way. I'd imagine lightworks would fit the bill though regardless.

I'm sorry to inform you, there's no "engineering mindset" in using the wrong tool for the job.

Well why are you using word to try to make large high quality documents? even with any amount of hacking it cannot be made suitable for the purpose. My biggest problem with proprietary software is when you hit a problem it was not originally designed to handle. If software is designed as a set of discrete parts you can mix them in certain ways or add your own to achieve what you wish, and this is how oss stuff is made and evolves. When it is all an integrated untouchable lump this becomes an issue.

"TeX is a small market" doesn't make sense. TeX, LaTeX and other derivatives are free, people use them as they see fit. Engineers do not need to write a lot of equations; heck, I have physics teachers who use word because they are too old to learn latex, and they haven't really had something complicated to write (experimental physics).

See this link for a good presentation of what TeX can actually do http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex . For arts and stuff.
Furthermore, consider that there are scientists who have to write equations as fast as normal text, because their normal text IS equations --- see this article for instance http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.0044 .

TeX is also a systematic system of writing. That means stuff like sympy (http://code.google.com/p/sympy/), maxima (http://maxima.sourceforge.net/), GiNaC (http://www.ginac.de/) and others can be used to make complicated symbolic computations and then output them automatically in a TeX file. Do you realize what this means in terms of productivity?

Anyway, my point is not to turn you into a TeX enthuziast. But, if you hear someone say that TeX is getting used more and more, don't act like we're just a couple of old farts talking about our half forgotten youth, because it really makes you look bad.

Actually, I happen to agree with the second poster. Although I won't contest that Qt is nicer to develop for in a lot of ways, KDE itself is an absolute nightmare. It's painfully obvious that KDE doesn't do UI testing, while GNOME appears to have at least made an attempt.

I present this screenshot of Amarok, which many KDE users seem to consider to be the "crown jewel" of the suite as evidence.

A few observations:

• Lots and lots of empty space. This could be fixed effortlessly, and yet it hasn't.
• Less than one third of the screen space is devoted to the application's primary function -- finding and playing music. It's nice that Amarok does lots of other stuff, but there's WAY too much going on all at once. (I always liked Winamp's collapsible interface -- there when you need it, gone when you don't)
• Lots of tiny icons with no apparent function. Although I commend KDE for finally drifting away from indistinguishable tiny blue icons, the replacements aren't much better. With the exception of the save icon, I cannot even begin to guess what the controls under the playlist do.
• Why are there tiny icons next to huge icons up top? The same three icons also appear below. WTF?
• Why is there a stop button?
• In the screenshot, the status bar is completely superfluous and unnecessary.
• The typefaces used in the UI are quite poor, and terribly kerned. I'll concede that this effects open source UIs across the board, though it is still unacceptable given that good open-source fonts are gradually becoming available, and that LaTeX's industry-leading typesetting algorithms have been open to the public for many years.

You can't mention office suites on the mac without bringing up iWork. Keynote is so much better than PowerPoint that it's virtually alone in its class, while Pages and Numbers are both quite good.

Pages lets you do proper page layouts in a word processing app, and offers better typography than Word (although it still lags behind LaTeX). Although it's arguably the least mature of the iWork apps, it's come a long way since its initial release, and I rarely use Word anymore.

Numbers is a great lightweight spreadsheet app that's perfectly sufficient for 99% of the world's spreadsheeting needs. In fact, its UI brings out most of Excel's commonly used functions (ie. most of what's in the Format -> Cell dialog) right onto the application's only toolbar. (The remaining 1% use Excel's advanced data acquisition and pivoting features, which, in all honesty, are quite good)

There's a lot to recommend Latex, and it wouldn't be unreasonable. That said, I have a hard time saying, for sure, yes. It probably depends on personal preference.

I'm a bit of a typography snob, so I like the things that Latex does that I don't know how to get Word to do. For instance, when typing in Word, when the line gets too long, it wraps. In Latex, the line breaks are not inserted by such a simple algorithm; perhaps breaking this line a little earlier will prevent a nasty break later. For more even more snobby examples, see here.

Another of Latex's benefits is its programmability; this will sometimes come in handy. If you look at the diversity of the Latex packages out there, it should become apparent what benefits this can have. It also means that it's a bit more complex.

Latex will do stuff like automatic table of contents too. For citations, there is Bibtex. I haven't used Zotero, but it's at least better than the experience I had of using a really old version of EndNote. Bibtex works pretty slick: you just put ~\cite{some-key} into your document, and it will look through the Bibtex database, find the reference marked {some-key}, put it into your bibliography, automatically number/name everything in the bibliography (using one of any number of styles), and insert the citation into the text of your document.

Finally, the fact that Latex works really well with version control because you can get reasonable diffs is almost a killer feature for me.

At the same time, I've also found that getting Latex to do stuff it wasn't built to do can often be a pain.

Also, if what you're doing is table-heavy, I might recommend you stay away; if you've ever hand-programmed in HTML and had to do tables and found it really annoying, you'll have the same problems with Latex.

Basically what it boils down to is that I think that Latex would be a reasonable choice for you, but I can't say with any certainty that it'd be a better choice than Word, or that Word would be better than Latex.

Except that in this case, you can bring out a magnifying glass and see the differences yourself. Kerning and layout is an art that has been perfected for centuries. For example, the visual weights of the letters must be accounted for. You can't just put letters on a line one after another and expect the results to be nice or even readable. TeX/LaTeX was designed to reproduce the implicit and explicit rules of text layout and kerning. It has a separate font rendering library called Metafont. The results are very good, so good in fact that many have been content to write front-ends that call TeX or LaTeX for typesetting.

MS Word was designed by engineers to dump letters in sequence on paper. Early versions were unable to kern at less than screen resolution (some 75dpi). Later versions shipped with TrueType fonts lacking proper kerning information. The results are not good. So bad, in fact, that people turn to other alternatives. Reading documents "typeset" by Word in Times New Roman hurts your eyes, just like listening to 96 kbps MP3:s hurts your ears.

Some reading, if you don't believe:

http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex
http://robgoodlatte.com/2007/07/24/3-examples-of-bad-microsoft-word-typography/

--Bud

LaTeX needs more flexibility (positioning accents, stacking symbols together, similarities), and more special symbols (integrals,...). Anyway, it should decide completely against bitmapped fonts and rely on postscript fonts only.

Again, is there anything that XeTeX cannot do with respect to advanced typography? Why PostScript (Type 1?) fonts when you can have OpenType with all the advanced goodies?

What are you talking about? I'm currently running Linux and it supports exactly the same font formats as any version of Windows: OpenType, TrueType & Type 1.

The rendering options are also basically the same as you'll see on Windows and Mac OS X: there's the option for hinting either automatically or using the font's in-built hints. It features sub-pixel rendering just the same as Windows & Mac OS X.

Maybe if you said that out of the box, Linux doesn't look quite as good as some other choices, I could agree with you. But, Linux is quite easily configurable to look great.

In some cases, Linux font usage is superior to what you'll find on Windows. XeTeX, for example, features full support for OpenType ligatures and proper kerning. Neither of these features are available in Microsoft Word. Please see:

The Beauty of LaTeX.

I HAVE spent 2000+ hours using Adobe InDesign in the past year, and I do use optical kerning on almost every body of text I deal with.

Ah, which is why I'm so happy I use TeX. Knuth et al. really perfected computerized kerning. Visit here for some examples of the beauty of TeX.