Unfortunately, I actually want to have out of the box sampled instruments (or physically modeled), like Cinematic Studio String or Infinite Brass, rather than a sampler to building your own instruments because sample libraries much are more complex which the devs have scripted legato into their their instruments and sampled many other articulations in depth to make the instrument more expressive and realistic.
I could use SunVox (or wait, didn’t Renoise has a great sampler to begin with?) instead if I want to have a more in depth sampling, which I did in the recent tracks written with orchestral instruments, but the quality is noticeably worse than the original library and it was too time consuming and not space efficient.
For some reasons, most of the major sampling companies are so hesitant on building a Linux versions for their sampler, but in another perspective, they are really the reason why aren’t more music producers jumping into Linux, or they have to use a dual boot setup just for making music, specifically.
However, we have some hope though. After doing some researches, audio modeling seems to have official q&a section mentioning how to load their instrument in the linux, so they seems to be more open to Linux comparing to a “Big No” response from NI (Although everything works with wine except for Native Access). Even better, I also just found that there is a company called librewave, making sampled instruments with native linux support. Although it is not the Cinematic Studio level of spectacularity, it still sounds highly convincing, and enjoyable; clearly, I have overlooked the native linux support for pianoteq. With all these instruments with a bit of epic percussion samples, it is possible to write some good orchestral piece in theory.
My couple of c as someone who has used everything from Windows XP to Win 11, All (and I mean all) Linux distros and DEs, and have recently gotten a MacBook.
GUI design is degrading ubiquitously, as well as software quality in general. The reason for that is over-popularization, and over-inflation of the IT sector - everyone wants a comfy remote IT job now, everyone thinks they are programmers or are on the track to become one. As a result, the bar is lowered way more than it should, and percentage of qualified specialists is low. Combined with over-optimization of the business side of IT companies, they push out garbage now where user experience is not even a low-priority goal - it is simply out of scope. There is no respect for the user, the user is exploited and the user is the product.
It makes me think that what we get from Apple is not even that bad.
Windows, anything after 8 has been just layers and layers of Javascript on top of Windows 7, and poorly designed Javascript at that. Is it horrible? Yes. Does it still kinda work? Yes.
Linux DEs are sadly not better. A Linux DE is one of the 2 things:
Potentially well-designed, but bug-infested, beta-quality software with missing features (fractional scaling? we still don’t know how to draw graphics on our OS!). All due to lack of resources and fragmentation. Elementary OS? Deepin? Cinnamon? Solus? NewShinyThingOSThatIsGoingToBeAbandonedInACoupleYearsOS? Why don’t all of these guys just join forces to make one awesome OS?
Has actual quality control and usability, at least at first glance, close to the level of a commercial OS. But to balance things out, is going to have absolutely schizophrenic design and dev direction. Talking about you GNOME. Ok, maybe I’m being too harsh on it. If anything, as of now it is the only DE on Linux that is at least usable.
My predictions are: a company, either big tech like Google, or mid tech like with Steam Deck, is going to take up linux, either take an existing distro, or just the kernel, and finally build an actual usable desktop OS and THEN is going to be the moment when linux will start seeing mass adoption and market share % will finally be anything more than 0,00001% etc. Steam Deck showed us that it is indeed possible. Hell, Android is linux-based and it is the most used OS worldwide. It’s only a matter of time before Linux gets on the desktop. It just needs robust financial backing to do so, as a couple of hobbyists working on a distro in their spare time won’t do.
Good points, but I am convinced this is of course a management problem. Surely there are young developers overestimating their skills. But I also think this is kind of normal for a beginner. The problem is here that in “agile” modern organisation, these people often are not supported by senior devs, and often there is no room left to actually learn stuff due to all the tasks and responsibilities you have to manage at once. It’s mostly the problem of these very neoliberally organised companies which took the original Agile Manifest and made an annoying controlling mechanism out of it. Also often the decision makers have no technical knowledge at all. I think the whole modern organisation in these companies is totally flawed. Also it doesn’t help, if a company neither does not care for their actual clients anymore, nor has a proper feedback/communication system with the clients, and instead prefers to satisfy the investors, like Apple or Microsoft. It’s the end of real progress.
Linux surely has different problems, like you mentioned, too many people still are reinventing the wheel all the time, not being organisated well. At least, Linux does not seem to suffer from poorly organised end-capitalistic companies.
…And on a sidenote, AI does not help here either, instead it makes the problem worse. AI makes a lot of non-programmers believe that they now had super programming skills, but in reality, AI is not even suitable problems which require 100% exact solutions (like coding). And the good knowledge might not even be written down publicly in the internet, so the assumptions the AI will make are not even that good. AI is the cementation of the very poor status quo, IMHO.
The fact the Microsoft now uses AI for an high percentage of their code is absolutely not a sign of an increased quality. And it does not solve a single management problem.
I don’t know the use of JavaScript in Windows, but I kinda know the abuse of JavaScript in all other applications. JavaScript is one of the most common programming languages these days, paired with Python which belonging to the same category of programming languages (Garbage Collected, Dynamically Typed, Runtime Error Centric). They were meant to only used for small scripting programs or defining behavior of some websites, but for many reasons, people just want to use their one language for all the stuff and get the job done quickly and dirty:
Vue js for frontend
Node js for backend
Electron for anything else
elk for embedded system (meant to be a joke, but I can’t believe it being real)
Basically, they are just JavaScript from the visuals all the way down to the servers. (Or python if you swap it with flask)
As a result, now we have a bunch of people only know how computer works on the surface level, applying dependencies on top of another dependencies, abstraction above abstractions, having no care on how their use of programming language allocates the memory, nor when a garbage trigger it cleaning routine; otherwise, we won’t see a single Reddit or GitHub Page consuming >300 mb of Ram.
Edit: The problems above are some of the reasons why I am learning zig these days since I am also fed of using hugely inefficient yet simple application where my Asus Zenbook runs like a jet engine.
I’m staying on Sequoia forever, I hate how people were comparing Tahoe to Vista, Vista/7 were beautiful and legible. I HATE rounded corners and now they had the brilliant idea of having different corner radiuses per app, low information density and trying to force MacOS to be iOS is giving me Windows 8 war flashbacks.
Some people will call you a luddite for criticizing things like this and AI but honestly after the 2010s innovation feels less purposeful and more “innovating for the sake of innovating”. Every year a lot of software seems to become bloated and slower for no reason. We have all this amazing hardware and we can’t even use it properly, things should be opening instantaneously.
I’m playing around with Reaper because it’s as lightweight as Renoise, really it’s incredible what they have accomplished with 200-400 mb installers and a barely noticeable resource consumption, they are the best examples of software optimization done right in the music space.
The new stuff is only shiny on the outside. Unfortunstely all new things are basically crap on the inside due to big tech following an user-unfriendly agenda (which is to make users evermore dependent, transparent and controllable. Big tech has become an extension of politics). I updated to Windows 10 and that’s it. I am done with “updating”. In the beginning of the Mac i would have switched but not anymore. It’s all greed and overrated devices. I truly miss the days of the Amiga and C64 where things were more honest and people were much more focused on creativity. When engineers designed a product as a whole. Today, most things feel like a marketing scam compared to that. I am sorry if this is going too far.
I now upgraded to macOS 15.7, I think it’s sane to upgrade to the last bugfixed version, since Apple published the yearly forced, “new” first release version of Tahoe in form of banana-ware.
I only upgraded, because I had to on my work machine, and also did benchmark tests beforehand, old vs. new OS version. The performance actually rised a tiny bit on an M1pro and M2pro system regarding CPU benchmarks, comparing macOS 14.6.1 vs 15.7, and significantly regarding GPU (metal) benchmark. I just used Geekbench, it’s not a very trustworthy benchmark. Apple actually seem to optimize core stuff. But this is just an assumption. They nowhere state that.
I also noticed a performance loss while 2x 4k 144Hz desktops and one is showing a fullscreen video under macOS 15.7 and M1pro. The other screen then starts to scroll laggy and jumpy. I think it’s related to fullscreen dynamic framerate adaption (disappears if the fullscreen screen runs at 60Hz), but somehow either the software or even the hardware then can’t handle the other screen’s refresh properly anymore. So this seems to be a degradation of daily performance.
At the same time they are bloating the system and system’s memory with like 30 new AI background services. They clearly do not test their system’s behaviour, if those services are deactivated, so actually behaving like optional services. What can you expect from a company for which the shareholder’s value is more important than their clients and the quality of their software products?
I also noticed these options in macOS 15.7, weren’t there in macOS 15.1, it was set to ON by default:
Wow, I am stunned by the uglyness of the new Tahoe system GUI design… OMG, what are they doing here? Outlines are now hip again?!? Is there an option to revert to the old look?
I also found out that these system daemons/agents are there for collecting data about your behaviour in Sequoia:
# agents
# apple data collection
'com.apple.analyticsagent' \
'com.apple.geoanalyticsd' \
'com.apple.inputanalyticsd' \
# apple experience knowledge / user erlebnis / context database
'com.apple.ContextStoreAgent' \
'com.apple.BiomeAgent' \
'com.apple.biomesyncd' \
'com.apple.intelligencecontextd' \
'com.apple.knowledge-agent' \
'com.apple.spotlightknowledged' \
'com.apple.spotlightknowledged.updater' \
'com.apple.spotlightknowledged.importer' \
'com.apple.siriknowledged' \
'com.apple.knowledgeconstructiond' \
'com.apple.siri.context.service' \
# coreduet, logs app usage for battery optimization, also part of knowledge db, handoff, continuity
'com.apple.duetexpertd' \
# daemons
# apple data collection
'com.apple.analyticsd' \
'com.apple.osanalytics.osanalyticshelper' \
'com.apple.memoryanalyticsd' \
'com.apple.systemstats.analysis' \
'com.apple.systemstats.daily' \
'com.apple.systemstats.microstackshot_periodic' \
'com.apple.wifianalyticsd' \
'com.apple.audioanalyticsd' \
'com.apple.ecosystemanalyticsd' \
# coreduet, logs app usage for battery optimization, also part of knowledge db, handoff, continuity
'com.apple.coreduetd' \
You can deactivate all of these, and the system still is running fine… (not 100% sure about Spotlight, which I have deactivated, using Quicksilver instead). Also most of these will send data to Apple servers and neither have OPT-IN nor OPT-OUT. I really wonder why this is legal at all.
Tahoe is worse, for sure. I will skip Tahoe completely.
, could you please explain
