[ardour-users] A decent sound card for Ardour

[Thomas Vecchione]

> I use Gentoo, I love Linux but for a new user, and I dare say for a hardware manufacturer they DO NOT see that Linux at it's core is NOT Ubuntu or Gentoo or Fedora or Debian. To a new user it is ALL Linux, and so when something doesn't go right, 
they blame Linux for it.


Which is all the more reason to make sure the correct information gets 
out.  If the misinformation continues to spread it will never go away.

That is why it is important(IMO) to highlight the differences, and why 
it is important to get hardware manufacturers to realise that it is NOT 
all that difficult to maintain a driver for open source.  They still 
only do the same amount of work they normally would, if that much, as 
some, maybe even most, bug fixing may even come from the community.

The main point of my post had less to do with the viewpoint of the new 
user, vs that of the manufacturer.  And why many people do blame 
manufacturers for hardware problems.  Because lets face it, if there 
were manufacturer provided open source drivers that were kept up to date 
for most hardware like there is for Windows or OS X, many problems(Not 
all, but many) that newcomers have with Linux in as far as having their 
hardware supported would in fact be fixed.

For instance, this thread probably would never have happened if RME had 
made the effort to update the Linux drivers like they do with Windows or 
Mac to be compatible with the updated revision of firmware.

In fact if my understanding of it is correct, this is part of the 
reasoning behind the recent open letter from kernel devs to write 
drivers for their hardware for free as long as the manufacturer is 
willing to provide information on it.  Obviously in the end we hope it 
provides better support for hardware for the end user, but also I would 
hope it might educate hardware manufacturers on why it is not that 
difficult to keep a driver updated.  Obviously whether this is the right 
method to take vs asking the manufacturers to write it themselves is a 
topic for another list and time as well.

> People do prefer to do things in their own way, and the whole Linux community is NEVER going to agree on one way that things should be managed.  Why?  Because there are pros and cons for every system - and when you aren't one entity such as Microsoft you can't make that happen - you can't enforce one standard

Thankfully in recent months/years there have been efforts to standardize 
some things without necessarily restricting choice.  For instance just 
getting package managers to talk to each other would be a great step 
forward IMO.  I still wonder if the strengths of apt and portage could 
not both be easily combined into a single package management system as 
they seem to operate in a very similar way for the end user(UnEducated 
opinion there mind you;)

> Many other just want the thing to work...and in that respect NO OS does that properly yet - and I doubt for a long time (Windows/OSX is probably doing it a little better at the moment) !

Mac OS probably has the lead.  Like I pointed out in the forum thread I 
posted the link to, it has the advantage as it takes away many of the 
unknowns and locks it down to a set of known hardware and software.  It 
is much easier to control things in that type of controlled environment. 
  Don't take this to mean I am saying it is a weaker OS though.  I am 
currently typing this on Mac OS on my Powerbook, while my workstation I 
do my work on runs Linux, as well as my Nokia 800 and 770 which are 
slowly taking over my day to day life management that I have been doing 
on my Powerbook.  Now there are limited things I use Mac OS for, though 
I still recommend it for those people looking for an alternative to 
Windows, but aren't ready yet, or happy with, Linux.

Which of course brings up the other point you posted...

> I know there are many people in the Linux community who want to see the whole world move over to Linux, and I was like that for a while...but I'm beginning not to care anymore.

I also tend to think it is not the answer for everyone, yet.  But I do 
hope some day it gets to that point, or at least distributions get to 
that point for desktops.  There have been some good moves in that 
direction, a few distributions have started doing impressive jobs on 
various machines for this purpose.  But on the flip side I am not sure 
it will ever happen, as there will always be choice with Linux, one of 
its strong suit, and choice confuses people.

      Seablade