[ubuntu-studio-devel] Some thoughts, frustrations, and considerations.

[Len Ovens]

On Sun, 23 Sep 2018, ttoine wrote:

> involved (MOTU and other people like that for Ubuntu). More, in some open source
> projects, only committers can vote on strategic decisions, and it's bad when they
> ignore theirs users or don't understand a specific emerging use of their project.
> That's why many open source project have bad UI/UX, and often, bad communication.
> I can't remember how much time someone answered to me in IRC "learn how to code
> and do it"...

Yes and no. As an Ardour dev, I have added a lot of stuff that is not 
useful to me. On the other hand, there are users or just people who like 
to comment, that have ideas that really don't make sense or that would be 
bad for the project or really can't be done without rewriting the whole 
project. When one of these people is insistant that their pet want gets 
added and won't leave you alone. There is a point of "no I won't add that, 
build a copy and add it yourself". even as someone who commits to Ardour 
frequently I still don't have a lot fo vote in it's direction ;)

> Engineers and technicians don't care that much about their operating system look
> and feel: they have the head in their applications. They are just looking for a
> very stable operating system and good devices drivers. Providing a slick dark
> theme and some nice backgrounds, a setup assistant, and too much pre-installed
> applications is not anymore what people want. The current need is a lightweight,
> clean install, and then they just add the few applications they use in their
> workflow. This is where AVLinux, KXStudio, or even a vanilla Ubuntu with a few
> modifications (my current choice) are good enough for those who can follow a
> howto :-)

While vanilla is much better than it was... well, it's not my favourite 
still. However, point taken.

> By the way, let's speak a bit about the beginnings of the Ubuntu Studio journey.
> At the origin (I was there...) Ubuntu Studio was a wiki page for vanilla Ubuntu,

I came along well after that. (there was a text based installed when I 
showed up)

> Regarding the project name, sometimes, I have the feeling that the name "Ubuntu
> Studio" was a good idea and a bad idea at the same time. In the past, it gave a

I remember, but I honestly don't remember how I felt at the time. Working 
with Ubuntu has not been easy. releases are based on other things than 
audio and as such we have ended up with releases just before major audio 
app releases or just before a significant bug fix (jackd comes to 
mind). This has made Studio instantly out of date. Running a PPA with just 
metas, an install applet and updates would allow keeping up with such 
thing much easier.

So why not use kx ppa? Some his utilities (cadence) make trouble shooting 
very hard on IRC or email. (controls current state is because of that)

> I stepped down from the project after Ubuntu 10.04 for two reasons: I became a
> father (and it means less time available), and I disagreed with the direction of
> the project at the time (particularly, the will to add as much packages as
> possible and focus energy on changing the desktop environment, instead of
> improving drivers and overall stability).

That has (or had) changed. Many packages were removed and the installer 
had a module added that allowed choosing which apps to actually install. 
So it was possible to have an audio only (no graphics/video apps) and not 
include non-used apps even in audio.

> In my humble opinion, an active website, with a dedicated forum, with section
> like "Audio", "Video", or "3D", welcoming any users of any Debian/Ubuntu
> derivative, would have been a key to create an active community. But because of

There are linux audio users email lists and formums and they are not doing 
so well these days either. The linux audio website is suffering from the 
same dev/maintainer burnout.

> There is something we must not forget: nowadays it has never been so easy to
> install a Debian based Linux distribution like Ubuntu, and then add/change a few
> things to use it as a very good audio or video workstation. Most people actually

There some good parts to this too. Having people asking for help about OS 
related things would automatically go to the flavour they installed rather 
than our almost empty IRC channel.

> Whatever is the decision of the current team, to continue or to stop the project,
> be sure there is no bad decision. Projects start, live, and die. Even if you
> would choose to stop Ubuntu Studio, parts of it will be used each time someone
> record music with a Debian based Linux distribution. This is a big legacy :-)

I think I will distribute ubuntustudio-controls under another name as 
well. Just to keep it alive if all else fails... and to make it more 
usable to those who are not using ubuntu.

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net