Post #3511785

2026-06-30 01:43 UTC

@xenogon@sunny.garden @alisynthesis@io.waxandleather.com @ercanbrack@mastodon.online @amadeus@mstdn.social Having mulled this for a few hours, linux has daws and trackers and just about everything it needs at a userland level. What it suffers from is lack of proper driver support. I have piles of line 6 gear (that was abaondoned on mac before windows, ironically) and i can use it all as sources under linux even via usb, but i can't control or edit the devices from linux and that's the pain for me. I've had mac hardware and made music on it myself, granted 2013 era, but the mac experience always felt like you had to believe it was good before it felt good, i just hit pain point after pain point. I've been a linux everyday driver since just after that because, some driver lack aside, i have had a more fluent experience as a user, programmer and hobbyist musician. TLDR i may be an outlier but i've never considered apple the best place to go for anything. My audio experience hasn't been flawless on linux but the macos one was conaiderably worse.

Replies (1)

@xenogon@sunny.garden 2026-06-30 08:22

@bloognoo@retro.pizza @alisynthesis@io.waxandleather.com @ercanbrack@mastodon.online @amadeus@mstdn.social My experience has been very much the reverse, on mac my audio stuff just works. Very few pain points with the music making. OFC apple and macos have been getting steadily worse in many other ways the last 15 years, but so far that has had little effect on using it as a music appliance. On linux I was spending more time making it work than making music, though things have improved since then , I'm not sure they have improved enough for me to want to switch back. When I did get a working linux system, I recorded a load of stuff only to discover that the unreported and therefore uncompensated latency *varied* between jack restarts. So there was a random error in overdub alignment not noticeable to the naked ear but still unacceptable to me. I agree so much about drivers though. Do loopback tests to measure real world latency, and check it stays the same across reboots. Last I checked (2025) linux had improved massively since 2019 in this area, but still couldn't match my RME FF800 with proprietary drivers on mac which is 100% sample accurate. In fact the perfection of the proprietary RME drivers had lulled me into the false sense that this was a normal and expected engineering standard, when in fact it's an outlier of exceptional excellence. There's a tendency in the linux world for devs to think that "passes clean audio" = "working" which may be the case for music playback, but is far from true in a recording studio.

Open ##3511786