“I’ve always thought of forums / sites such as KVR or Gearslutz etc as not really the places where linux users hang out, they tend to be Windows / Mac.”
KVR has been nicely supportive of Linux, they indicate Linux-related stuff, and there’s a fair amount of Linux-related discussion on the forums. I know some members of this board also frequent KVR. I particularly enjoy the fact that few (if any) respondents to my posts at KVR seem to care about the OS I use. They’ve focused on responding to my questions or listening to and commenting on my music. Perhaps I’m fortunate.
OTOH, I no longer visit the Reaper forums. Too much fanboy-ism there, though to be fair some die-hard Linux advocates are still hanging out there. I got tired of the bullsh*t, even though I think Reaper is a good program. Its devs are good fellows, they do work at the Wine support for Reaper.
IMO Gearslutz is not so amenable, but I don’t hang out there regularly.
Btw, there are easier and harder ways to build software these days. The process of determining dependencies is not so harrowing anymore, though of course it’s still time-consuming. Compiling still requires some knowledge of development tools, and I agree with you that most Win/Mac users are at a total loss when it comes to building software. Given my experience, I prefer open-source and compiling programs on my own.
Re: Sticking with old distros: Alas, some of the mainstream optimized distros aren’t exactly keeping up to date, and there is considerable trepidation on my part when it comes to switching distributions. Fortunately I can afford to keep three machines operational, and one of those boxes is always an experimental platform. I do my production work on a machine running 64 Studio 2.1, with a lot of self-upgraded software not included with the distro, and I’m unwilling to upgrade that box until 64 Studio officially upgrades.
Just my opinions, of course. Thanks for your message, and thank you for your excellent plugins. You are appreciated.
Dave, thanks for the info - It was a while ago that I went to KVR so I’ll take a more thorough look around, it may be a useful way to publicise some of the great things that are happening regarding linux audio at the moment.
Regarding building applications from source etc. As a software developer, I can figure it out, but I think it is sometimes an obstacle for people who are used to other operating systems - although the quality of the configure and build tools has improved enormously in recent times, there can still be situations where a missing library or dependency sneaks through and cause some quite bizarre compiler messages.
Old distros - I have to maintain several machines (mostly constructed from spare parts) in order to develop the software I produce (at the moment I have a rack with a couple of mini-itx based ‘servers’ which are used for 64/32bit compilation, an AMD64 based DAW - dual boot 64/32bit - which is used for testing - I like to keep the build environment completely seperate from the ‘test’ environment so I can be sure that installing new software or hardware on the test machine doesn’t break the build setup etc and vice-versa) and I use an ‘old’ dell laptop for installing new distros (currently Ubuntu) on so I can check for compatibility issues and so I don’t really care if its ‘broken’ most of the time, but generally I keep the build tools up to date and I don’t upgrade other things unless they have stopped working. As an example, my desktop machine which I use for basic editing of code, email, internet etc is still running Mandriva 2007.0 with the blacbox WM (and some patches) because it all works. I’ve also experimented with using virtual machines for some of the tasks but generally find you can only really stress test things properly using real hardware… And I have to maintain some real hardware for backups too.
Just some of the stuff that’s necessary to make these little bits of software and also some of the reasons why its not as cheap to make as some people might think - I wish it could be made available for free, but real world economics dictate otherwise unfortunately - but I digress (again)…
Thanks for your support - more plugins will be happening soon…
