[ardour-users] A decent sound card for Ardour

[Russell Hanaghan]

The analogy, "spicy food is not to everyone's liking" comes to mind.

Russell

On Fri, 2007-02-09 at 20:28 +0000, John Emmas wrote:
> Paul - I know we're digressing into commercial politics here but I'm going
> to ask you for a moment to put yourself in the position of being a hardware
> manufacturer.  I've been having this very discussion on a couple of Linux
> forums recently.  Here's the problem as I see it, from the perspective of a
> new user.....
> 
> Windows (whatever you might think of it) has one glorious thing going for
> it - namely, the ease of installation both of hardware drivers and software.
> I'm not saying it was always like this.  It wasn't.  But for at least the
> past 5 years, installing ANYTHING under Windows has been a simple matter of
> double clicking a file called SETUP.EXE and sitting back while the whole
> thing sorts itself out.  You may or may not need a reboot at the end - but
> either way, your software or hardware will be up & running in no time WITH
> NO INTERVENTION FROM YOU (and that's the important bit).
> 
> Contrast that with Linux.... APPLICATION installations are mostly quite
> slick due to utilities such as Synaptic - but frankly, driver installation
> is a complete and utter mess.  There are almost as many different procedures
> in use as there are different kinds of hardware.  For example, some drivers
> can be installed using apt-get install.  A few can be updated by Synaptic.
> Some are in self-extracting zip files or tarballs.  Others require you to
> extract a tarball and then run some kind of setup utility.  Others use a
> scripting approach.  Some (indeed most) require a command shell - often
> requiring you to enter cryptic parameters that only mean something to the
> person who wrote the program.  Some installations automatically overwrite
> pre-existing files.  Other don't.  Some drivers require 'make'.  Some
> require you to manually create or edit config files.  Others attend to any
> editing automatically.  The list of different approaches is endless.  I've
> even come across one driver where the installation method involved copying
> the relevant driver from my Windows partition and running a utility that
> re-configured it for Linux...!
> 
> The potential for error when installing Linux drivers is absolutely
> enormous.  If I were a hardware manufacturer I wouldn't go near Linux with a
> barge pole.  Why should I let my company's reputation be sullied by this
> absolute mish-mash of inconsistency?  Installing hardware under Linux is
> nothing less than a lottery.
> 
> If Linux wants manufacturers to take it seriously, it needs to define a
> single, unifed strategy for driver installation - so that, no matter what
> the driver; no matter who wrote it - users always install it the same way.
> For the past 12 weeks I've spent around 2 days per week trying out different
> flavours of Linux.  So far, I haven't done a single productive thing with it
> in all that time.  My entire time has been spent purely & simply trying to
> make the hardware work.
> 
> I've no doubt that Linux (in use) is every bit as good as any other modern
> OS but setting it up can be an absolute nightmare.
> 
> I know that this isn't what you guys want to hear - but I'm afraid it's the
> truth :-(
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> 
> John
> (and very sincere thanks to everyone who's helped me along the way.  Don't
> think I'm being ungrateful.  I'm not - but I think that the above needed to
> be said).
> _______________________________________________
> ardour-users mailing list
> ardour-users at lists.ardour.org
> http://lists.ardour.org/listinfo.cgi/ardour-users-ardour.org