azvasKvklenko

There’s absolutely zero reason to expect Linux mass adoption as it is NOT happening anytime soon. What can happen instead is increased market share to something like 10% and even that is super optimistic from a long time user perspective.

The focus should mainly go to relatively technical users that can at least manage basic stuff and not mass market consumers. It’s good when people try Linux, yes, but it’s even better when they find it useful, it does what they need and they keep using it, not just trying and go back to a primarily supported OS that’s maybe invasive but “at least it works”.

no automatic updates

Well it’s really not entirely true unless you’re on a rolling release (which most people should if they can do basic system administration themselves). Unattended updates were a thing in traditional Linux distros with frozen release cycles since forever. On any Ubuntu-based system it’s a matter of switching a toggle, and I think it could’ve been Mint that enabled that by default (I’m not sure) at least for security updates, because users never updated their systems. They can still be done much quicker and more transparently than Windows does that, without ever forcing users to reboot in any given time.

The problem is also that once in like 5 years you absolutely have to upgrade system to a newer version to keep it updates in such scenario. Popping up a dialog with info that your system goes EOL and you’ll loose security updates and one click upgrade button should be enough.

No. Nobody cares, no matter what MS does. They can literally crap on users faces and they’ll happily lick it as long is Windows is the supported platform. And it will stay like that for decades to come.

We can expect some growth, because the tech savvy PC enthusiasts might want to look for alternatives, and if the desktop Linux is good enough, some will stick to it, some will go back, as it was always for last 30 years.

That’s what I’m saying - booting OSes is the only legitimate use now unless you want to put stuff on an offline machine (eg installed Linux and need to put broadcom proprietary driver packages on it to be able to connect, cuz no access to an ethernet cable)

I prefer Ventoy, because I can put however many different ISOs on it by just dragging ISO files to a folder, and I can use rest of the drive for regular file storage. But still it’s really sweet Mint has such option easily available!

There is Ubuntu package it seems, so it’s a matter of sudo apt install ardour

Wow, what OS you used and where did you take your binaries from? It’s free and open source, but their official builds (distributed through their official website) are paid. I’m using Arch official repo package and it asked me for a donation on first boot, but I could just select to never bother me with it again. You can build Ardour freely on any OS from source, but Linux distros are also free to provide their own packages and most of em do. There’s also Flatpak Ardour build, but your plugins then also must be installed from Flatpak, Wine must be from Flatpak etc., doable but not the most convenient

As for Windows plugins with no native Linux version, there are ways to use VSTs over Wine. Check out Yabridge project. There’s no guarantee that 100% of plugins will work, but many do pretty well. It requires some additional setup, but once it’s done, you don’t have to think about it much, just call yabridgectl when you add new plugins to sync them (it creates stub library that is seen as Linux native, but it wraps Windows plugin using Wine)

Reaper is perfectly fine choice if you’re already familiar with it, but here are some other you may want to look at:

FOSS Options:

• Ardour - it’s pretty old, UX is not perfectly intuitive, basically GIMP of the audio world, but it can do everything you’d expect a professional DAW to do, while being incredibly lightweight. It’s straightforward to install on any Linux system.
• Zrhythm - it’s a new DAW that didn’t have a stable release yet, but it’s on 1.0 RC1 so I guess it’s pretty close. It has some promising user interface and feature set, also easy to get installed, but might not be super solid just yet.

Commercial options:

• Bitwig Studio - probably the best audio workstation for Linux, but also the most expensive.
• Waveform Tracktion - I personally had mixed experience with it. On one hand the UX and flow is quite good (not as flexible as ardour, way more opinionated, but still fully functional and easier to use), but I had bad time dealing with a large project as the editor becomes extremely sluggish as your project grows.

I deleted my comment right after I added it, but apparently it doesn’t always work like that on fediverse

What’s a use of USB sticks anyway outside of booting operating systems? They perform worse (or on par at best) than modern wifi adapters

Wait for NVIDIA 555 driver release, use a bleeding edge rolling release distro (like Arch or OpenSuse tumbleweed) to get explicit sync support and use Wayland instead of X11. Soon the pain will be over…