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Progress on Plasma

ubuntustudio.org

101–110 of 138 posts

Re: Progress on Plasma

#101
post #59

Why is it that the basic unit of distribution for anything Linux is a Distro? Want to serve web applications? Here’s a server distro. Want to work on penetration testing? Here’s a distro. Want to develop embedded systems? Another Distro. Creative arts? Distro again. The OS level fragmentation of Linux is maddening, when you consider that what these actually all are is different operating systems. Why does the Ubuntu…

In the case of Ubuntu Studio, you get hundreds of apps and plugins and FX systems and other creative apps, already installed out of the box, courtesy of the distro politics you don't seem to understand .. to get a similar degree of packed install on a Windows or Mac DAW you'd have to, at least, spend a week selecting things and downloading from vendors, getting iLok working, and so on.

With Ubuntu Studio, once you've installed it on your hardware you have TONS - and I mean TONS - of things already installed and ready to go. No further work ready to get your workstation settled - just open the apps and start working. This is a feature not a bug.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#102
post #87
post #59

Why is it that the basic unit of distribution for anything Linux is a Distro? Want to serve web applications? Here’s a server distro. Want to work on penetration testing? Here’s a distro. Want to develop embedded systems? Another Distro. Creative arts? Distro again. The OS level fragmentation of Linux is maddening, when you consider that what these actually all are is different operating systems. Why does the Ubuntu…

That's not true. > Want to serve web applications? apt-get install nginx > Want to work on penetration testing? apt-get install nmap netcat > Want to develop embedded systems? I don't even know what you need for that besides ssh and busybox, honestly. > Creative arts? apt-get install gimp

Yes I know of course, so why do we need all these tweaked specialist distros? Are they really just repackaging stuff or do they actually contribute real value and if so what is it?

Re: Progress on Plasma

#103
post #86
post #59

Why is it that the basic unit of distribution for anything Linux is a Distro? Want to serve web applications? Here’s a server distro. Want to work on penetration testing? Here’s a distro. Want to develop embedded systems? Another Distro. Creative arts? Distro again. The OS level fragmentation of Linux is maddening, when you consider that what these actually all are is different operating systems. Why does the Ubuntu…

The devil is in defaults. If at anytime ostree or Nix-like distributions will take over, then I would expect more "channels", "repositories" or other wie-heißt-ers, than distros.

We're already seeing this with Snappy and Flatpak.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#104
post #102
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. > Want to serve web applications? apt-get install nginx > Want to work on penetration testing? apt-get install nmap netcat > Want to develop embedded systems? I don't even know what you need for that besides ssh and busybox, honestly. > Creative arts? apt-get install gimp

Yes I know of course, so why do we need all these tweaked specialist distros? Are they really just repackaging stuff or do they actually contribute real value and if so what is it?

Yes. For example, if you're working with audio, you'll want a realtime kernel, and an audio subsystem configured for that use case over a default desktop distro.

Running a realtime kernel on a desktop can be slower, and a desktop Pulseaudio setup isn't going to be enough for someone working with audio, they'll probably want Jack, too.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#105
post #102
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. > Want to serve web applications? apt-get install nginx > Want to work on penetration testing? apt-get install nmap netcat > Want to develop embedded systems? I don't even know what you need for that besides ssh and busybox, honestly. > Creative arts? apt-get install gimp

Yes I know of course, so why do we need all these tweaked specialist distros? Are they really just repackaging stuff or do they actually contribute real value and if so what is it?

The big split is between packaging systems. You have:

- The Debian family using Apt: Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc.

- The Red Hat family using RPM: RHEL, Fedora, Cent OS, etc

- Arch using Pacman

- NixOs using Nix.

- Gentoo compiling from source

Re: Progress on Plasma

#106
post #59

Why is it that the basic unit of distribution for anything Linux is a Distro? Want to serve web applications? Here’s a server distro. Want to work on penetration testing? Here’s a distro. Want to develop embedded systems? Another Distro. Creative arts? Distro again. The OS level fragmentation of Linux is maddening, when you consider that what these actually all are is different operating systems. Why does the Ubuntu…

Some people want or need a tailored experience that they don't have to configure much if at all. e.g. making Linux suitable for near-real time audio work, restricting Linux to a set of well-tested stable packages for high uptime, making it as close to a standards desktop experience where the expectations are set by Windows and MacOS, making it sandbox absolutely everything by default because you have reasons to be ex…

> I use Arch btw.

That's like the OS-equivalent of being a vegan these days: how do you know someone's using Arch?

They'll tell you without you even asking :D

j/k btw.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#107
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But they didn’t feel familiar to me. I'm shocked by this, especially when the alternative here is GNOME. You can put a lifelong windows user in front of a plasma machine and they will be able to figure it out easy. There is a start menu, a bottom taskbar, all the window buttons are where they belong, etc. Contrast with gnome, where you can't get anything done unless you already know the magical keyboard shortcuts.…

No disagreement here. I don't use gnome desktops, for similar reasons (although I'm also not the target audience for adopters, as I currently use Linux as my primary desktop environment!) I use cinnamon, as, for my personal preferences, it strikes the best balance between familiarity, 'prettiness' and functionality of the options I've tried.

I think Cinnamon is really underrated. It has sane defaults, is reasonably performant, and will be familiar to anyone coming from Windows.

In general I feel that Gnome has terrible defaults, and are hostile to the user making changes away from these defaults. It's also less performant than Cinnamon -- animations can lag on my machine for example, and my machine isn't exactly bad.

I think Plasma is nice, and it's certainly more customizable than Cinnamon, but I think this comes at the cost of reliability and an overall feeling of cohesiveness. I also think there's a point where you don't want every right click menu to contain an option which allows you to fundamentally change the functionality of your desktop.

I'd probably be using XFCE or Mate if Cinnamon didn't exist.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#108
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a joke? There's so much overhead in getting a working setup compared to MacOS, and only one of the major DAWs even runs natively on it. The tools are far from "excellent" compared to the offerings on MacOS and even Windows. I can't even get the Jack server to start on my Ubuntu machine. It's not snobbiness, the software isn't there and what is there is user hostile. I know the reply to this comment is "have y…

This is not a joke, but I don't think you could've even tried Ubuntu Studio as a professional - seems more likely you sniffed at it as a hobbyist and couldn't deal with it. I haven't found it to be any hassle to get a working, stable and low latency setup with Ubuntu Studio AT ALL, but then I've chosen my hardware properly: Presonus for everything. Its amazing, and very good latency - exceeding even the results I get…

My professional experience includes developing tools for major production environments (7-8 figure budgets for audio content). I don't really want to launch into a rant here, just to say that my "prejudice" is very much post-judice based on a decade of industry experience, and like many Linux users - your experience has not been mine, because my knobs are turned to different positions and I can't recreate the environment that you describe.

I'm glad that your environment works for you.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#109
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people want or need a tailored experience that they don't have to configure much if at all. e.g. making Linux suitable for near-real time audio work, restricting Linux to a set of well-tested stable packages for high uptime, making it as close to a standards desktop experience where the expectations are set by Windows and MacOS, making it sandbox absolutely everything by default because you have reasons to be ex…

> I use Arch btw. That's like the OS-equivalent of being a vegan these days: how do you know someone's using Arch? They'll tell you without you even asking :D j/k btw.

Not sure how I feel about this as a vegan Arch user. :)

On a more serious note, it's actually worked well in my experience for finding other Arch users. It's rather likely that someone exposes themselves as an Arch user soon after a first encounter rather than finding out months later, so (as with veganism) serves as a relatively salient marker of community membership, for better or for worse.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#110
post #39
post #7

People who use KDE, what's your favorite distro? I wanna give ita shot.

Why does choice of desktop environment impact choice of distro? I ask as a question out of my own ignorance. I started with arch and I just bolt on whatever desktop environment or window manager I want.

There are occasionally little things that are available on one distribution and not available on others. For example, with Cinnamon and Linux Mint, you can right click on items in the start menu and there will be an option listed to uninstall the clicked program. This was (and probably still is) missing from Cinnamon in Debian / Fedora.

I imagine there are other things like this with most distributions.

Or for something like Plasma, you can go with Kubuntu or KDE Neon. Both of them are Ubuntu derivatives which are meant to be used with Plasma. But KDE Neon will get you the latest Plasma version, and Kubuntu will not be bleeding edge.

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