7 minutes ago, AudioDoctor said:
You’re not wrong as for the most part linux just runs in the background and does its thing. The one drawback to Ubuntu server is the lack of a GUI, but using it eliminates a lot of unnecessary fluff that I think influences the sound.
Here is a recent example… I tried using rsync to sync music files between the source, an external thunderbolt drive on my Mac, and the external thunderbolt ZFS raid attached to the machine running ubuntu server and MinimServer. So I read all the links, read man pages, read through convoluted and confusing and overly complicated “tutorials” and then went ahead and did the deed only to find out alter that I now had two copies of everything on the destination. Of course, Linux did not cause this, I did, but the fact that it took all that effort to do something that should be simple only to have it mess up is the frustrating part. Luckily, I have good backups and it wasn’t a disaster to recover from. I only had to re-rip a few very recent CD additions.
Then there is the fun part of even installing MinimServer on a headless machine… You can’t even download it without a GUI… Which means I had to go to google again and figure out how to transfer the file to the machine from my Mac, copy and move commands via command line, etc…
My point is, none of this is not frustrating, only the end result makes it worthwhile.
And this, “despite there also being a simple GUI to do the same job.” You could not have nailed Linux users better than you just did here. This is so true it hurts.
I am a very strong proponent of Unix-like OSes, having LOTS of experience with many kinds of OSes. My big beef with Windows is the ‘automatic’ stuff that seems to want to do things without warning. Sure, much of the craziness can be disabled — but next release will have more of a different kind of nonsense. The ONLY reason why I run Windows right now is to build Windows versions of my program.
Last time I tried to really depend on Windows, was ready to do a televisit with my doctor, but Windows decided to do an update that expected to take a very long time. Sure, it could have been stopped, except I was using a very slow laptop (still 1000’s of times faster than an old DEC-10 supporting dozens of users, or 100’s of times faster than the first 386’s). The problem was the UPDATE PROCESS, not so much the video conferencing. Darned windows box couldn’t even do an update in a reasonable amount of time, and even stopping the update took many minutes. Windows has too much stuff going on. The licensing is also worrisome. Just want it to do what I ask, with NO surprises. Doing the same command should do the same thing practically every time. Windows sometimes has other opinions. (Admittedly, I just powered up the laptop, but I powered it up for a reason — not for system maintenance at the time.)
Linux is not perfect, but has been much less troublesome for my audio work than the alternative.
I regularly had sparring sessions with Linus, and tend to hate GPL, but no matter what — even with my strong bias against that version of a Unix-like OS — Linux just works for me.
Quality wise — bits is bits. (There might be some who disagree, but I have no interest in that kind of discussion right now.)
Perhaps the kind of UI might direct someone away from Linux… Then, the choice what someone likes to use has tradeoffs, either way.
