I love open source. I love the technology, the philosophy, and the people in the trenches making things better.
But I give up. Between proprietary hardware drivers and slow software release cycles for the things that matter most to me, I’m done.
I just spent two hours to accomplish the following: Download a new album that we paid for and play it back on my television. That’s it!
Two. Fucking. Hours. And still no music playing. So, I rebooted to my Windows 7 partition:
- Boot to desktop screen: 30 seconds
- Launch Google Chrome, load and login to GMail, click on e-mail link: 10 seconds
- Download new album: 60 seconds
- Plug in the HDMI cable, launch VLC: 10 seconds
- Total time: less than two minutes and now we’re listening to Metric‘s new album Synthetica.
Loving the album by the way. They struck out on their own from their record label for the last album Fantasies and this is their second independent release.
I’ve been trying for the last couple years to move my music composition and podcasting away from Mac and Windows to Linux with mixed success. Podcasting under Linux is simple as long as you have basic hardware that is supported: class compliant USB devices, or a reasonably mainstream sound card.
I can internally route Skype streams, web clips, other sources and record it all to independent tracks to Ardour for later editing. There’s some great info about this aspect from the Balticon panel about open source podcasting.
Where things break down for podcasting is if you need to use advanced audio hardware like Firewire or USB2 mixers and interfaces. Driver support is minimal, flaky, or (more likely) non-existent.
This isn’t a shortcoming of Linux, or the community of thousands of passionate hackers that make it all work as well as it does – this is because big companies refuse to open source their drivers, and don’t have a profit motivation to make their software available on Linux.
In fact, none of my issues have to do with Linux itself. It’s just that, due to the way the world works, it takes awhile to get things fully functioning. I’ve got another blog post in the works that delves into this a bit more in reviewing my latest laptop. The device is so new (it was a warrantly replacement) that there are even huge issues in Windows – they’re just not as frustrating as they are under Linux.
Music composition and production is an entirely other matter. Aside from hardware issues, the software is still far from where it needs to be to get out of your way and let you make music.
Ardour and Audacity are solid, but they’re still butt ugly. Appearances shouldn’t matter but the hard edges, jagged fonts and buttons take your attention away from the waveforms you are making dance.
Hydrogen is a decent drum machine, and there are some good sounding drum kits for it, but it is still far less flexible than it needs to be to create something other than a demo and there are many features still lacking to make it a professional contender.
Then there are the plugins.. oh, the plugins. This boggles my mind as there are some really awesome open source plugins out there. But there are holes that have been waiting to be filled for years and years (real time noise reduction anyone?) and even though the pieces are there, nobody has had the time to scratch that particular itch and pull them together.
Again, nobody’s fault – they are pouring their time and energy into making this great free stuff that we all benefit from – but frustrating none the less. I contribute bug reports and money where able, but it doesn’t get songs written any faster.
Another glaring hole is virtual instruments, particularly software synthesizers. Not important to all musicians, but something I use a lot. Again, there are some solid contenders out there, but the offerings on Windows and Mac are far superior either in their audio engines, interfaces, or presets.
As I said, I’m going to write a post on the new computer, but in short; using Linux on it is a near daily struggle with one aspect or another for many interactions. I’m fighting the sound card, video driver, or struggling to get my mouse to work.
Rant over.. I feel better getting that off my chest. Thanks for sticking around!
I may not walk away from Linux on the desktop entirely (it will certainly remain my server platform of choice) but for the next few days at least I’m going to ignore it, cool down, then sort out my currently broken configurations and decide whether to keep putting energy into it or not.
Update 4/8/2013: I did make the move to 100% Windows 7 on my primary workstation. Overall it’s been a good move and has greatly increased my creative output. I never did write that laptop review.. I need to get on that as well as updating my Toolbox page since a lot has changed.
2 Comments
You know that you branch out into realms I don’t even contemplate, but, this is why I have never branched out in that direction. I absolutely hate (pet peeve) hardware that doesn’t work right, and 9 times out of 10, it’s a driver issue. They are nearly impossibly (IMHO) under Windows, I can’t even imagine dealing with them under Linux. Mac, of course is a much more closed environment, so you have some security there but at the cost of limitations in what you can buy and usually at a higher price point.
I blame the Hardware manufacturer’s for adding so much software bloat to their drivers. We use HP printers at work, something I haven’t fought changing simply because I didn’t want to deal with accounting whining because they order the ink cartridges. But HP has added so much crap to their print drivers, I am finally considering taking on that battle, because Accounting maybe an easier foe then HP. I recently installed an HP 4500 all in one printer at one of our stores, granted our PC’s are older, but they are still XP w/SP3. It spent over an hour installing, then for no apparent reason based on the less then helpful error message, failed. They have added little apps to buy cartridges from them, added tool bars to IE (or sold the right to add other companies tool bars), added additional web printing, and about 100 other useless apps and applets, instead of sticking to what the user needs, which is a well written driver that allows the hardware to interface with the OS. It’s just ridiculous the amount of code bloat they add to try and bump up their bottom line instead of providing what I was trained as the proper way to code, following the KISS method.
Hardware manufacturer’s need to learn that less is more. Keep it simple and make it work seamlessly…. Do that, and I will be elated with your product.
I have enough time suck’s in my life without that hassle. Maybe it’s fun for a hobbyist to deal with these things, but it doesn’t improve our bottom line at work, and I personally would rather be surfing the web or watching TV at home.
Sorry, to jump your soap box, but it just really hit home as of problems of late.
I feel ya! Ironically, in a business setting Linux is way better than Windows in most regards. I was humming along great on an older computer, but with graphics and audio chipsets that were just released a few months ago, it’s a nightmare!
If I didn’t “need” to access advanced video features, write music, or use some exotic audio hardware, I’d still be 100% satisfied with Linux on the desktop.
And the funny thing about Mac, if I remember the stats correctly, there are more Linux desktops in use than Mac desktops, it’s just that people spend considerably more money in apps and hardware on the Mac, so there is little incentive for companies to properly support Linux outside of a server environment.