quote:
My opinion is Linux audio support is just basic (it sucks).
When I was in year 12 physics we were doing a project on sound (waves, reverb, harmonics blah blah blah.) So our teacher took us out to a sound studio in Melbourne. This guy had literally hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gear in his little studio (just on the crown casino side of the yarra, next to swanston if anyone wants to get in and have a look. small building on top the melbourne theater.) Now this guy did tonnes of sound work for bands and for the melbourne theater. I remember him trashing the winamp equalizer because it only had 6 or so seperate equalizer controls and how a good soundie needed so much more. I remember how he hated the preset equalizer controls that came with stereos and soundblaster live cards because they "assumed" too much about the music. My friend got real upset bout that, having just paid a few hundred extra on a stereo for those little extras. I also remember that the only computers in his office not running Linux were the comps the school kids got to play on so that he could teach us how sound stuff worked. Ever heard of "final scratch?" It's a big DJ table you hook up to a laptop for DJs - because someone realised a PC could hold more music than a whole box of records and that it weighed less too. So a DJ table that played music out a comp and let you "emulate" record scratching too was made. And guess what? It only runs on Linux because the sound engineers figured that Linux had better support for music and that BeOS was too underground and incomplete. A lot of people now are seeing a big computer in the boot with a few 60gig drives full of high quality ogg files as the ultimate addition to a massive car sound system seeing as it can hold so much more music than even a few CD's shoved into an MP3 cd player in the front. Considering a friend of mine is looking into this and that said friend has a $800 dollar *faceplate* (ie not an actual CD player, just the front of it with a pretty little LCD screen) in his car I'd say that a lot of people seem to find Linux sound support just dandy.
Also the "I would prefer Mac OS X or Unix to Linux servers." Well thats interesting, because it seems a lot of large companies don't. In fact, it seems MS themselves have hired a large amount of Linux computers to hide behind.
Linux is making a significant impact on the server market, such as with Oracle which I get to use for my database administration course. Did you know that the Oracle company (who make a US$100,000+ database product) recommends Linux because they feel it's a better server? It's also amazing to compare the *average* Linux server to the *average* Windows server rather than just picking one crap little Linux server and comparing it to Windows.com. Considering the crap little server in question is "neowin.com" I take it these guys dont know what they're doing with Linux.
And yes. Linux does need more work to make it easier to use by traditional Windows users such as yourself. I agree, sometimes it takes way too much effort to set something up in Linux, even for tech savvy people like yourself. But please, dont immediately discount it as "crap" just because it needs a lot more work on ease of use.
