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Linux Turns 25, Is Bigger and More Professional Than Ever (arstechnica.com)
The Linux operating system kernel is 25 years old this month, ArsTechnica writes. It was August 25, 1991 when Linus Torvalds posted his famous message announcing the project, claiming that Linux was "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu." From the article: But now, Linux is far bigger and more professional than Torvalds could have imagined. Linux powers huge portions of the Internet's infrastructure, corporate data centers, websites, stock exchanges, the world's most widely used smartphone operating system, and nearly all of the world's fastest supercomputers. The successes easily outweigh Linux's failure to unseat Microsoft and Apple on PCs, but Linux has still managed to get on tens of millions of desktops and laptops and Linux software even runs on Windows.Do you use any Linux-based operating system? Share your experience with it. What changes would you want to see in it in the next five years?
I remember when Linus posted it. I downloaded it and played with it a bit.
When Slackware 0.99a came out I gave it another try. It was not long before I was converting my Minix boxes at the house over to Linux.
In 1995 I switched from Windows 3.11 to Slackware and never looked back. To this day I run linux on all my systems at home save a small laptop that runs Windows XP though it is just to manage the spectrophotometer which does not have a linux driver.
Linux has come a long way and I am always amazed at how much of the world runs linux from Cell Phones, to routers, to supercomputers.
Ardour is great, and so is Reaper. The existence of a solid DAW on Linux isn't the issue at this point.
First, one of the major issues is inertia - Logic Pro, Ableton, ProTools, Cubase, Sonar, and FL Studio are all respected names in the field, with lots of users, forums, and ecosystems around them. Audio engineering is very susceptible to a herd mentality, because anyone who uses something different will be told to join the herd, rather than getting actual support.
Next, audio engineering is much more hardware dependent than most CS/IT disciplines. For us, 'input' basically consists of keyboards and NICs, which are interchangeable. Pro audio involves audio interfaces from Tascam, Presonus, M-Audio, and FocusRite, with MIDI controllers ranging from Korg/Yamaha keyboards to guitar pedals and drum pads. We'll circle back to the interface problems in a moment, but the MIDI controllers are largely USB now, meaning there are abstraction layers that may require specialized drivers, mapping software, and plug-ins.
Back to the audio interface question, amongst the major things we have here is that Jack/Alsa are fine for desktops with Realtek chipsets, but when you're dealing with thousand dollar interfaces that can record sixteen channels of audio in real-time with 1ms latency, Jack and Alsa just don't cut it. OSX has CoreAudio and Windows has ASIO, both of which are industry standards that work with those interfaces. Linux would need something similar to it, but even if such a thing were to come into existence, support by the hardware OEMs is certainly not coming into place overnight. Meanwhile, those OEMs need to sell gear, which means that CoreAudio and ASIO handle over 99% of the market, and no one seems to be chomping at the bit to write yet another audio system for Linux to even provide a viable target. Reaper and Ardour could well start on that, but now you have DAW devs stuck writing middleware that already exists on Windows and OSX.
I look forward to it happening, but it's a pipe dream right now. Hardware OEMs are targeting ASIO and CoreAudio, plug-in writers are targeting Ableton, Protools, and VST hosts, industry standard DAWs are targeting Windows and OSX, and a soup-to-nuts Linux ecosystem would require cooperation from everyone at the same time for a market segment that's super picky at best.