Comment by gnulinux | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnulinux | Hacker News Reader

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> But buying little apps is simply not common on linux. Sure many would but why when you can just apt an easily alternative.

Because I want to pay people to write good software for me. I hate using OSX and Windows, but I want to have a DAW like Logic etc. My only options are stuff like Ardour, which happen not to work on my computer (because linux audio system is broken) due to alsa/jack/pulseaudio weirdness. And I have no leverage over Ardour developers. All I can do is:

* Look online to find solutions to my problem. This didn't lead anywhere.

* Download Ardour code and understand how it connects to the audio device and reproduce it, this way I can see the error. Luckily I can read code, most consumers can't.

* Send a message to Ardour devs/forums and cross fingers they help me out.

I want a company that produces software like MSFT, AAPL, Adobe etc and make it linux first and GPL. I understand that this is a terrible business model, which is why I want to pay extra money for this shit. Like Logic on OSX is $200. I want to pay $300 something that's approximately like that but works on my distro as flawlessly as Logic works on OSX.

I just want to not read pulse audio man files when I need a DAW, in exchange for $X * $200.

I'm just daydreaming, I know this stuff will never happen. I'm not sure exactly why. I hate the modern software ecosystem.

It's not worth the trouble. I heard rants about apple being hard to develop for where you have very limited line of hardware, have swift and plenty of high level APIs, App Store and very loyal userbase.

Linux is not for average software consumer, you have to know how computer works in order to use it. The simple fact that linux lacks MS Word/Excel, Photoshop is already hints that something is off.

Linux is just a kernel and then from 2% marketshare you go down for marketshare of each distribution you want to develop your software for and try to sell to consumers who asks why your code is not GPL, why I can't modify it on my own.

I've tried gaming on linux and can't describe how bad my experience was even on popular titles like CS:GO, where you have lower FPS and glitches with graphic settings, like not able to play stretched resolution sometime and then some update literally broke a game for a while. You have to jump loops all the time to just make programs run and the issue here is that, as a linux user, you expected to do it and it's just normal, when on Mac/Windows the user expected to just know nothing and all issues got fixed by software vendor.

Just try to install firefox on linux, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FirefoxNewVersion (you have to find this page as well), show that screen to average computer user and see what happens. Compare it to Mac OS https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-download-and-instal....

Reaper is absolutely amazing, works on Linux just fine (natively! And supports LV2 plugins) and it's only $60 (and the demo version is a WinRar-like "I'm still using it" button). It's also a completely no-bullshit approach to software development, no subscriptions, nothing like that. Buy the license once, and upgrade to a commercial license (which is still less than the price of something like Ableton or Logic) if you are using it to make more than something like $20k. It's proprietary, but it's completely customizable, even coming with its own scripting engine. I think you should give it a shot, GPL is the only thing missing from your list of requirements, but it's also made by a small independent team that doesn't do the usual crap associated with bigger apps.

A good alternative to JACK and PulseAudio is PipeWire, which for me has worked basically completely flawlessly and supports JACK and PulseAudio bridges natively.

Sounds good, I'll check it out.

I was mostly giving DAW as an example though, same would go to any kind of specialized software.

EDIT: unrelated but, from Reaper purchase page:

> If you own multiple computers, you may install the same license key on all of them, as long as you only use REAPER on one computer at a time.

I love this, let's not pretend people have a single computer. A have multiple linux workstations, and an OSX workstation. As long as it's me, the person who bought it, is using the software on different machines, I should be able to get away with single license.

> I was mostly giving DAW as an example though, same would go to any kind of specialized software.

Yep, I'd absolutely love a real Photoshop competitor made in a similar spirit to reaper. Photoshop just has too many niceties that something like gimp doesn't even come close to (one that comes to mind is Select Subject - has probably saved me hours of work and does a much better job than I ever could manually)

> > If you own multiple computers, you may install the same license key on all of them, as long as you only use REAPER on one computer at a time.

> I love this, let's not pretend people have a single computer.

This is what I meant by no bullshit licensing, it's really refreshing to see a professional and competitive product be this way when it comes to user freedom. I'd like it to be open source, but this is probably the next best thing.

Just a shame that most audio plugins don't follow the same philosophy, otherwise I'd happily be using just Linux for music production (though you can at least make most windows-only plugins work on linux through wine)

Commenting as a reminder to follow this up :)

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