Windows 2000 was a bug riddled, poorly architected punching bag for malware.
Things definitely went up-hill AFTER Windows 2000.
What on earth would cause someone to say Windows 2000 was a good release? It wasn't even a good release when it came out, and it definitely didn't stand the test of time.
I used this site as a reference earlier this year quite often, as I attempted to establish some baseline for a Linux DAW. I use Mac for serious audio stuff, but 'what if' (since I use Linux for everything else anyway).
I came back pleasantly surprised with the current state of things. Minus the underlying linux sound system, which is still a mess of things that barely work together. (I have a lot of expensive/pro plugins and all the DAWs on the Mac, so this was mostly a filtering exercise - what I can use on Linux that can still mix/master a whole project).
- I'm not a FOSS purist in audio, so that wasn't a requirement. But I am 'linux purist' so no VST wrappers of windows DLLs etc.
- Watershed moment for me: Toneboosters and Kazrog coming to Linux. Along with u-he, these make for a very, very high quality offering. You can easily mix a commercial release just with these. Kazrog isn't even 'Linux beta' like the rest, proper full release on Linux. I was briefly involved in beta testing for Linux, Shane & co are incredible people.
- I have most/all DAWs for the Mac. Reaper and Bitwig on Linux are enough for me and feel like good citizens in Linux. (ProTools is never coming, neither is Logic. But addition of Studio One makes for a really good trio).
- Any USB class-compliant audio interface will work (modulo control applications which generally aren't available on Linux, so ymmv).
- iLok is missing, which removes a whole host of possible options (I have 500+ licences on my iLok dongle, none of that stuff is accessible). I can't say I miss iLok, but I do miss Softube (not that it's available on Linux, iLok or not).
I made a few 100+ tracks mixes on my thinkpad with Reaper and the above combo of plugins, it worked just fine.
But Linux is still Linux, and 30 years later still annoys me with typical 'linux problems', which generally boil down to 'lack of care'. UI is still laggy, compositors be damned. While Reaper is butter-smooth on a Mac, audio thread never interferes with UI (and vice versa), it can get quite choppy on Linux. If you allow your laptop to go to sleep with a DAW open, chances are good that upon resuming you'll have to restart it as it will lose sound. And a lot of smaller annoyances that are just lack of polish and/or persistent bugs, that I'm sadly used to on Linux (want to switch users on Linux Mint? The lock screen can get hella confused and require a lot of tinkering to get the desktop back). But overall, it's a million miles away from a hobbyist endeavour that Linux audio used to be until recently. I could get actual work done with Linux this time around.
PipeWire seems to solve all the audio stuff for me, zero problems since I made the switch. I had audio fail on resume once when I first installed PipeWire; if memory serves it was that the default settings for PipeWire was to restart the audio server on resume which screwed things up because Jack kept running. Something like that. The fix was simple, just comment out a line and uncomment another. Everything audio has just worked ever since.
I have not had any UI issues in at least a decade on Slackware. The few times I tried Mint over the years, it was filled with random annoyances like you mention.
Edit: This is not advocating using Slackware for audio work, it works great but it is Slackware and most don't get along with the Slackware way. But there is a DAW module for AlienBob's Slackware Live Edition[0]. It worked alright when I tried it, as well as any other live distro.
I dont/didn't use Jack at all, straight into pipewire, which makes for a super unintuitive way to select 'audio device' in Reaper (iirc, something like select ALSA and 'default's for input/output and somehow that's all routed via pipewire). I'm not unhappy about pipewire, I finally have a low-ish latency audio system (enough for mixing, if not recording) that I don't have to spend hours on to get it to work. A la MacOS.
But generally that's my point, 'it works if you go and edit this obscure line in this obscure config file'. Mac has had a stable CoreAudio backend for quarter of a century now (counterpoint - Windows is also a mess). I wish Linux would stabilise their userland a bit more and stop rewriting stuff every few years.
Sometimes I wish there was a commercial company behind 'linux for audio' that will give me a finely tuned Linux distro on a finely tuned desktop machine, based on whatever distro, I don't really care. But have it all released/patched at their own pace, as long as everything 'just works'. I'd be happy to pay for that. The whole 'OS due upgrade, is anything going to work tomorrow, I have a session' is still an unsolved problem on _every_ OS/platform. Most busy studio heads go years without installing/upgrading _anything_ for fear of having a lemon after said upgrade, with clients waiting at the door.
>Sometimes I wish there was a commercial company behind 'linux for audio' that will give me a finely tuned Linux distro on a finely tuned desktop machine, based on whatever distro,
That would be Ubuntu Studio or Kx-Studio. Mint is quite far from what you want unless you are willing to put in the time to set it up right. Most any distro which ships PipeWire with Jack support enabled will probably perform better than your Mint setup running ALSA. PipeWire speaks Jack so if built with Jack support, any Jack aware application will connect to PipeWire with no need to start Jack or anything, it just works.
It is not an obscure file that I had to edit, it is the file (script) which starts the server. Took maybe 5 minutes to get everything working flawlessly and that includes compiling PipeWire since Slackware does not build it with Jack support and a google search to find out why resume killed the audio.
Isn't Apple taking UK gov't to court over this, and the reason they have abandoned encryption for everybody is to avoid being forced to provide backdoors. On this you should be on their side, not against them.
If Apple was transparent, I would be. But they are user-hostile and trust the federal government more than their customers. Apple is on-record[0] admitting that the US government requires them to their cover-up cooperation with surveillance. After decades of users demanding proper accountability from Apple, this is exactly what they warned would happen.
You have no right to demand that I take their side - Apple's disregard for privacy nauseates me. Everyone who sincerely trusted Apple to protect them against the fed is a lost cause. Go ask Apple to save you.
Although effective, this particular technique does not scale very well. Even if the UK had 100,000 kidnapping wrench torturers, it would take ~2 years for them to get through to pulling everyone in the UK’s teeth.
Fortunately for those who like laws having an effect, that's not factoring in the deterrence aspect of the first (few) toothpull event(s)
It's the law that's the issue. Avoiding enforcement only works until people actually care to start enforcing. There's also enough examples in history of people taking matters into their own hands if they disagree with something, doubly so if there's a law against it or something else makes them feel righteous. If you do bad in the eyes of the public (or its prosecutor), good luck swimming against the tide
Macintosh has always been application-centric, instead of window-centric desktop. Hence the top application menu that controls the 'application'. There is nothing inherently wrong with that approach.
And I'm not sure why anyone would complain that installing (most, not all) applications is just dragging an icon into applications folder.
There are a lot of small companies / single devs working in very technical, pro-oriented, industries. They still thrive in the days of browsers and javascripts and what not, writing super optimised, super inovative, native code.
Like all the 'audio plugins' people that essentially write .so's that go into the big desktop audio workstations, doing anything and everything with sound, while also experimenting with various UI/UX paradigms, unrestricted by what's possible in the DOM/CSS, integrating hardware into it all etc. (I imagine similar in the video/rendering industry, but I'm not too familiar with that side)
A lot of this stuff has been investigated in Mr Alexandrescu's ironically named book Modern C++. Typelists (before variadic templates) recursive templates and componenet-like assembling of classes, etc.
I imagine there is a modern-modern-c++ version of Loki library somewhere on github.
HN is a pretty high trust site, I'd hope the community is still mature enough to self-moderate. Then again I was here when Terry would post his (admittedly) entertaining rants, the epic Michael O'Church essays, and flamewars between idlewords and pg. Maybe it always allowed for a little bit of funposting, in moderation.
A brilliant idea some startup accelerator in the EU can create a platform that conforms to EU laws. It can't be that hard, given that the UI hasn't changed much in a decade or more. I can already see it "Hacker news, but hosted in the EU with Swiss privacy and is GDPR compliant".
