Marginally Music Related Linux Nerd Post

Turbo Linux was the very first but only lasted on my PC for a few hours. Then I picked up RedHat 6.1 or 6.2, I don't remember which but I have the disks around here somewhere. I bought it in a box! I didn't do much with it though. I complained about what a PITA Linux was to a CS major friend of mine. He told me I shouldn't bother with it. I didn't listen. The first distro I used somewhat regularly was SuSE (also boxed). Then I moved to Mandrake and I loved it. It was the first somewhat easy to use Linux I used and I used it regularly. I got especially easy to use once I switched to broadband and didn't have to screw with winmodems anymore. Mandrake stumbled though. They slowed their releases and that made it harder to get new software updates. Plus RPM was always a pain. Then Ubuntu hit the scene and I've been using it and it derivatives (like Mint) ever since. Now Linux is a pleasure to use and even easier to install and update than Windows. I use it for pretty much everything except audio recording and a few games.

Speaking of audio, one of the few things in Linux that has lagged behind Windows is audio tools. That has just recently started to change as a few of the best audio tools available for Linux have matured to the point of usability versus hair-pulling. Ardour, for example, always looked attractive but used JACK. And early versions of JACK, at least for me, were impossible to get working. Now it's alot more automated and stable and usable versions are (more or less) available in various repositories. Though for whatever reason, the official Ubuntu repositories seems to have alot of fubar'd software that I want to use. I had to get the current version of Ardour from getdeb.net because of an impossible to get around bug in the file open dialog in the official Ubuntu version. However, I used it to remix a few songs for Blind With Rain and it worked well. I still had to use software on Windows to master the remixes though. Anyway, audio on Linux is slowly getting there. It's usable but I seriously doubt it will ever have the polish and presentation and support that the proprietary audio software companies can provide. The demand for Linux enterprise solutions is there and so is the need for cheap servers. The same can't be said for high-end audio recording and editing software. It's a niche market.

There's no point to any of this really, I'm just babbling.