Kind of like when dell started offering RH7 on their machines to lower end-user costs? Oh yeahhhh they had to stop doing that because sales went through the floor. =/forge wrote:good point....bencodec wrote:. but as the price of hardware comes down and the price of windoze stays the same pretty soon all the manufactureers are gonna have to strat offing Linux versions of theres packaged systems to allow their prices to continue to fall competitively .
The only thing that will encourage commercial hw distributors to package linux with their products is consumer demand. This is why IBM can get away with it at the enterprise level, but you won't ever see HP offer a preinstalled joe-shmoe linux box at best buy (I hope I end up eating my words on this one).
As far as linux's ability to be a competitive OS in the audio industry, it's got quite a ways to go, imo. Not to sound like an apple fanboy, but there's a reason that I use a mac for making music and linux for pretty much everything else. I like being able to drop the app I want from a dmg to my apps folder, launch it, and then whoo!, you're ready to make music not more than 10 seconds later. In linux, you have to play the "well, this library needs THIS library, which seems to want THIS other dependency which I guess I'll go out and build" game.
I've been proven wrong in the past about this, though... I was highly skeptical of audacity, and now it's one of my favorite sound editors out there. It's really just a matter of getting enough good, polished apps out in the community to encourage companies like ableton to make linux ports. It's been done in other fields, this one is just a matter of time....
My only worry is that h/w manufacturers won't believe in the Open Source movement and just release binaries of their drivers - but the beauty of Linux is that you have millions of geeks writing software for you to use, simply cos they like it.
