[Ardour-Users] OSX vs Linu

[Justin M. Streiner]

On Sun, 23 Aug 2009, Rob Quin wrote:

> Lucus, if you want to do other peoples DIY for them then that's up to you but
> it always ends up more complicated than you expect. In my experience it
> always works better if we all take control of our own computers in the way we
> feel comfortable with. The advice from this passionate Linux freak is let
> them have a Mac. It will be far less work for you to get your head around
> OS_X than for you to support them getting their heads around Linux.

Agreed.  As someone who has acted as the 'family/friend IT support person' 
in the past, you're usually much better off sticking with what the user 
needs.

Upgrades often present opportunities for broken/unresolved dependencies 
but OSX very good at shielding the end user from this, plus Apple is very 
good about putting out point-relases of OSX to pull in new libraries/etc 
as they're needed.  As others have mentioned, Apple needs to worry about 
supporting far fewer combinations of hardware than Linux developers and 
distro maintainers, and Apple has had a huge presence in the 
multimedia/audio world for many years, so Mac OSX compatibility and 
support from 3rd party hardware vendors is likely to be very solid.

Linux distros and their package management systems have come a very long 
way in the past several years but there are still opportunities to get 
into dependency hell and spending time squashing bugs and research odd 
errors.  I've found this to be particularly true if you're using 
hardware, packages or settings that are outside of your chosen distro's 
'comfort zone'.  For example Gentoo users who have had to pull in lots of 
ebuilds from the ~x86 tree are no doubt familiar with this.  I'm not 
knocking Gentoo on this - that's the distro I'm most familiar with, but 
I've also started messing around with Arch, on the advice of people on 
this list :)

Making hardware vendors aware of the capabilities of Linux as an audio 
production tool for people want to move or keep their workflow entirely in 
Linux is an ongoing battle, but one that's beginning to pay some 
dividends (FFADO is a perfect example).

my 2 cents

jms