Forging a new path.

[Hakan Koseoglu]

Ah, a long discussion. Just to cut it short:

- Skype : some people just need it. I use it extensively with my
Ubuntu Studio for my podcasts.

- Other apps: I'm not making any money out of music, I use Ubuntu
Studio because it's the best of the multi-purpose distributions
designed with audio/graphics in mind. I can compile C code, write Java
and do recording in the evenings w/o a single reboot and I really like
it that way.

- Geared for audio only: I hope not. There are plenty of distributions
for that. I installed Musix 2.0 alpha today and it worked out of the
box. Kudos to them. I would prefer my experience with Jaunty Studio
will be the same (so far so good with the betas minus KDE 4(VIA
chipset bug already open and confirmed but not fixed yet - (un)
fortunately it works with Jaunty + Gnome (yikes!).

- Pulseaudio vs. Jack : I'd prefer jack to be the default but hey,
that's life. What I'd prefer is more stuff compiled with Jack support
out of the box. I really got used to having loads of stuff compiled
with Jack support on PlanetCCRMA, switching to bog-standard 7.04 was a
bit of a rude suprise. It's getting better since then but I still
compile most of my own stuff to catch up or have more libraries
compiled in. /usr/local here is getting a bit crowded on my main audio
lappie.

- Longer release cycles following LTS : It's good on paper but not
really, sorry. I compiled Rackarrak on my 8.04 studio laptop today
because it's too new to exist on that one. It's brilliant and works
wonderfully but I am definitely not a newbie and not a regular user
either (having used Linux for too long helps). Especially Linux Audio
software is advancing at a very rapid pace, I wouldn't like to
reinstall/upgrade my laptops every 3 months but years between
dedicated audio/video software would be a bit too much to bear (I
don't have the same with my LTS web server, Apache + PHP don't advance
as they used to).

- Special Distribution: Well, lately I prefer installing Kubuntu and
then pulling all of the ubuntustudio metapackages to get the studio
stuff. If I was installing this lot in a dedicated studio environment
I'd probably do it from the DVD. I hope creating the dedicated
environment doesn't take that much of the efforts. Thinking about the
average Ubuntu studio users (I'd guess it's not the majority of this
mailing list) I would guess most of the Ubuntu Studio users are people
who do audio or graphics on the side therefore won't really want just
the audio stuff. On the other hand, having the special distributions
work like marketing. I installed it on a couple of friends and they're
quite happy (I have to admit I tend not to enable the realtime kernels
on their Grubs).

- Help: well, I run the Ubuntu Studio packages from alpha releases, I
hope that counts. :)

All I wanted to say is what you do is not necessarily what everyone
else does. If we can't find what we need as users, we can just switch
distributions, move on to something more suitable for us. There are
plenty of choices, PlanetCCRMA used to be my previous choice of DAW,
since then there are plenty more arriving to the scene.

IMHO, what puts Ubuntu Studio aside is its resiliency, multi-purpose
attitude: with minimal amount of work, it becomes an excellent
distribution to be used for everything. Not perfect but still I think
it's the best out there for what it can do. I would like to prefer to
have it that way.

Hmm, what else.. Ah yes...
Good work! Keep on doing the good stuff.

(Written on a Jaunty i386 laptop with Studio stuff loaded up and it
works, (apart from KDE, pls, don't get me started... :) ))