Tech Over Tea - Making Audio Production On Linux Good | Amadeus Paulussen

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

Today we have the founder of the Linux Audio Plugin Development an initiative to bring audio production plugins natively over to Linux.==========Support The Channel==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson==========Guest Links==========Website: https://linuxaudio.dev/Mastodon: https://mstdn.social/@linuxaudiodevelopmentYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/@linuxaudiodevelopment==========Support The Show==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson=========Video Platforms==========🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg=========Audio Release=========🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea==========Social Media==========🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345==========Credits==========🎨 Channel Art:All my art has was created by Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as well as your host, Brodie Robertson. And today, we're doing one of these rare episodes where someone actually reached out to me first. So how about you introduce yourself and we'll just go from there? Sure. Thank you very much for actually having me on your show. Yeah, so I switched to Linux five years ago.

My name is Amadeus Paolosan. I am a music producer. and I think I worked like close to 30 years on macOS and ever since I'm on Linux I felt like driven to of course motivate other people to try it as well and especially to motivate the developers to actually build Linux builds of their software and yeah I think maybe half a year ago or so it started to get a little bit like more intense and so I started to actually actually talk to tons of developers and some of them agree to make Linux build. I helped them debug and stuff and I felt it would be the right time

to reach out to you and maybe yeah, make you aware of this stuff that I'm doing here because it's still, I mean, it's really small I think if I would count all the people that I know that make music with Linux maybe 50 people or something

like that. But I think that's basically why I reached out So where do you think it's the best place to start here? I think maybe like the kinds of tools that people are using, but I'm happy to go in any direction that you want to go here. Sure. I mean, you know, I think on Linux to make music, I think two of the biggest problems are audio interfaces and hardware in general

that the manufacturer is just plain ignore Linux. There is no software to configure the stuff. And for instance, in pro audio, you have lots of special tools like, for instance, room calibration software that measures the speaker and stuff. And even though it would be relatively simple, and many of these tools actually are written with the help of Juice with this framework. So it would be simple for them to make Linux build. Many vendors decide not to do it. Assume that's J-U-C-E? Yes.

Okay, cool. Yeah, the Juice Framework. And actually, I think most of the vendors, they have like old, old views about Linux. They are really scared of Linux. They think, like, oh, my God, these people will tear our support team apart. They have like 20 different Windows systems, window managers, desktop environments, and et cetera, et cetera. But the more I talk to the developers who actually made the step and made Linux builds, the more they said this is actually completely debunk.

This is not true. Usually the Linux users help themselves as long as it's possible. And when they reach out, the bug reports are actually very good, et cetera, et cetera. So this is one reason why I think that it's not so easy to get into audio production on Linux because the soft that you might already have can eventually, yeah, maybe it's just not working on Linux. And then the other side is the music producers often are really addicted to plugins. Like you have your digital audio workstation and then you have tons of plugins that you can install and use. And it's also like a really crowded market.

I think there's a lot of money to make because there's so many companies that offer plugins. And also many of them, of course, don't support Linux. And when I started with Linux five years ago, this was also, you know, on one side it was also, a blessing for me because I really felt addicted to this stuff. Like I felt like whatever comes out, I have to get it. I have to try it. And after a while, I even made a little spreadsheet for myself that I could use to filter through all the stuff because I forgot about what all I have.

And so in the beginning on Linux, I felt like, oh, my God, good. I don't have so many plugins. But then, of course, the urge came back. And then there's really stuff that you need in order to do some work. And it was not available. So I started to annoy all kinds of vendors to support Linux. And out of some of these connections, I would even call it like little friendships, you know, where I helped them to basically make it happen that they could support Linux

because most of them, they don't have the time to test it even, you know. Then they are really happy if there's someone who helps them to test it. And that's actually my mission right now. I am on this mission to contact vendors, convince them that Linux is actually amazing nowadays to make music. And then the other thing is that I try to, yeah, how to say, to motivate the community to also do their part. And that's still something that I'm not so sure about because I think there's lots of people who use Linux for music making. But maybe I cannot reach them sometimes because what I sometimes did is I made, you know, in an official forum. Basically, I said, hey, all you Linux musicians, please voice your desire to have this and that on Linux.

And then sometimes participation was very low. But in other cases, participation was very high. So that's also still something I try to figure out how it works. Just trying to find, like, where they actually are. Exactly. And also, I am not visible, you know. I have maybe, I don't know, 100 followers here, 50 followers there. And I think this whole thing needs to be a little bit.

better how does it represent it and and and also i am you know when i switched to linux it was a special phase in my life i also basically um destroyed all my social media accounts i only kept like redid because i use it often to just look up things or discuss things and i kept instagram because that was the the most easiest way to connect to people and other than that i'm not present i have no accounts you know i'm not on facebook and not on x and yeah so It's kind of difficult. But that's what I want to do. Actually, I want to reach more people so that they maybe on one end want to try Linux

for music making and on the other end to motivate the developers to actually do, you know, to tick the box so that they make Linux bills. I think there's a right now a lot of push for, you know, people in the gaming space, people in general computing, all of this stuff to swap to Linux. But I don't really hear much from the. music production side. And maybe, I know you're saying you were using Mac before, maybe you have some more opinions on this. Why is it that people tend to gravitate from what I can see towards the Mac side? Like, what is being offered there that people seem to want? Hmm. Well, I don't know,

to be honest. I think Mac always gives the impression that it's going to be simple. You know, you buy the MacBook, the operation system is already on there. Everything is more or less done for you. Nowadays, you have broad support, like all the tools that you could want. They probably run on Mac. And I think there is this, even though I think it's probably not true, but I think many people have this conception that Mac always is the industry standard. You know, like if you have a Mac and you go to a studio, you will have no problems.

That's always also one of the questions I asked the linear. musicians, do you encounter any issues because of you maybe running into a studio with your Linux computer? And all of them say no, no issues at all, you know. But I think that's probably the reason, yeah. No, I can definitely, I can definitely understand that. Especially if you're not someone who wants to deal with a computer, you use a computer as a tool rather than you're interested in the computer itself, right? Like, there's this expectation on Linux that you generally have some interest

in, you know, customizing the system, customizing your desktop, things like this. But if your entire goal is to use it like an appliance, I can certainly see why you'd want to go with the thing that everyone kind of just says works, so you don't really have to worry about it. Yeah, absolutely. And that's also something, you know,

I recently wrote a guide how to start with music, production on Linux, and I realized that I am now knee-deep into this venture, and for me, it seems very simple. You can have that Mac-like experience with Linux. No problem. But in the beginning, when you start to learn about Linux, the question is always what distro, what desktop environment, you know, and what is Hyperland? Should I try Hyperland and stuff? Like, I think in the beginning you can just be very overwhelming. And I also hear a lot, people say that the Linux adoption would become bigger if actually more devices would ship with Linux. And I agree that this whole first little phase where you have to read a little bit and learn a little bit

about Linux before you can actually start is, I think, for many people already overwhelming enough that they don't try it. So you mentioned earlier plugins and how people kind of rely on these plugins. I don't know anything about music production at all. So why is there such a desire to have all of these plugins available? So I think there are certain things like, you know, like for instance, audio restoration where you need certain like tools that are really highly developed and specialized on certain tasks. For instance, where you can remove artifacts from audio or de-noise, audio, et cetera, et cetera. So there's all these things that are really specialized

that you don't have as a standard toolkit in your DAW. But then I think the much larger part of this is just inspiration. Like many of the tools that are super successful, like plugins, it's basically just a nice shell, a nice workflow to do something that you could actually do without the plugin, if you're very honest. And that's also what I did in the beginning, I switched to Linux, I just said, okay, now let's just use the things that come out of the box and I actually seldomly came into a situation where I realized like, oh, shit, now I don't have

that on Linux. I cannot do it. But it's these two things. And I think, yeah, there are still certain things that are really missing on Linux, like in this post-production, audio, restoration, editing professional tool stuff. But then again, I mean, there's so many also open source stuff. There's, for instance, the Linux Studio project where you have a ton of plugins that are really highly developed. And of course, it's like so often in Linux and open source that you have to be willing to go that route.

Like, for instance, I also do a lot of graphic design and web development and stuff. And there are on Mac again, there are apps that are like so polished that when you come to an open source alternative, like let's take for instance Adobe Illustrator and then you come to Inkscape in the beginning, you think like, oh man, everything is so cumbersome before this took two clicks. Now it's like five clicks. But after a while, you really fall in love with these tools and you learn to value them. And then on top, that was something that was really important for me, this experience. Like I had a company in Switzerland for 25 years where we did web development.

So we used a lot of open source stuff. And we were used to, you know, report box, get like are in a conversation with the developers and then get the fix. And for instance, on Mac OS, I can tell you, like maybe 10 years, there were some really annoying box, and you could report them over and over. You would not get any feedback. You would not know what's going on.

It was really frustrating. And when I started to use Linux and I started to report box, and then all of a sudden I felt like, oh, my God, that's so amazing. Now I talk to the people who are actually making the software, and they ask me questions, and I help to fix it. And even maybe I'm not a developer, you know, but maybe I make some nice graphics and commit them to the project and then they're eventually even used. It's like it's almost like growing your own tomatoes. It's just an experience you have to, I don't know, you have to go through in order to understand it.

Yeah. It's really beautiful. So if somebody wants to get involved in doing audio production on Linux, I know you've got this guide and we can kind of go through a bit of it here. But, like, what does someone need to understand about what they're doing? There's the obvious things that is just naturally the case with Linux, like, oh, the distribution you're using, you need to have hardware that is compatible with Linux. But the audio-specific stuff, like, what do you need to sort of consider? So, you know, that's also something I am, like, I have an opinion on it, but I also respect other people's opinions. Like so many people that are longer in Linux,

they, for instance, they swear by the power of Jack, for instance. And they know how to set it up and they have tons of, like, I don't know, use cases that they can really make it a good thing. But for me in the beginning, when I started with Linux, I felt pretty overwhelmed by these things. Like, why do I have to configure an audio server first before I can actually use my programs? And then PipeWire came along.

And I am anyways addicted to adopting new stuff. That's why, you know, I understand like in the Linux world, there's many things like Wayland, Flatpack, all these things that are controversial. And I am just a person who I think this makes sense. I believe in it. And then I even go the painful way. Even if I know like, oh my God, OBS is like just a pain with Wayland or whatever, I go that route.

But in general, like my, and that's my suggestion, So people would be take a modern distribution, go with pipewire, don't install Jack. I would never advise anyone to use something like Ubuntu Studio, for instance, that comes with a ton of apps, because I think you actually don't need all these apps in the beginning. And I think it's better if you go step by step. So rather taking something that has everything there for you, you'd much rather people bring things in as they need them so they sort of understand why they're there. Exactly. Look, you know, it's like if I would tell you, Brody, you want to start learning music, here's my studio. Go. You would say, oh, my God, there's so much stuff to learn. But if I would tell you, look, here you have a standalone unit and you can make some sounds of it and record it, then you can learn step by step. That's why I think if you start with Linux, you obviously have to choose a DAW. And there's like for me, the reason why I in the beginning even thought about Linux is because Bitwick Studio was.

available for Linux and that's actually my it's like a how do you say it's like a lego technique kit in a way a science toolkit right you can connect everything to everything and it's like very very fun for me to use but other people might want to use something else like reaper or studio one and when you have chosen this the only thing in my opinion that you need is a modern distribution with pipe wire and you're good to go if you then need more performance then you need to tweak the real-time aspects a little bit but that's really all only a couple of steps. I think, personally, you don't need much more to start. And actually, I think it's best if you don't have much more to start and just go step by step, right?

Yeah, real-time audio is something that I should probably, properly configure on my system, because it is kind of relevant for what I'm doing with, you know, the live streaming and the video capture stuff. I've had a number of, a number of audio capture issues over my time. And I'm pretty sure I know why they're there and I'm pretty sure doing this would probably fix them as well I did start using I started capturing my mic through jack

in pipe wire so the pipewire jack stuff and the problems have mostly gone away but that does kind of limit me in certain ways and it doesn't help with other situations so I probably should go through and make sure everything is sort of configured for

nice low latency audio yeah Yeah, you can use this little app millisecond. That's actually really helpful because it scans your system and basically tells you what you need to change. And then it always links to the Linux musicians wiki, I think, or Linux audio.org wiki. And so I did most of these things with the arch wiki.

And the arch wiki is also really helpful if you are on an arch distribution to do that stuff. And actually, it's really not that much. You don't even need a real-time. kernel actually. It's just a few settings that you need to adjust and then you're, you already have a much better performance.

So when it comes to the hardware you're picking, what do you need to consider on that side? Because I have, I can't, I don't want to turn my camera because I'll never get back to where I have it. I have something massively overkill

for what I'm doing. I have a Yamaha MG 10XU here so I can plug a bunch of junk into it. But I bought this like seven years ago at this point. So if somebody doesn't have something or they do have something and they want to know if it does work, what do they need to consider there? So maybe I want to tell you something a little bit, you know, like as a preface to this basically. Because I also wasn't aware of this. Nowadays, if I tell you, if someone asks me what audio interface will work with Linux, I say just make sure it also works with iOS.

or iPad OS and then it also works with Linux. And that was actually one of the biggest drivers in the beginning to make stuff work on Linux because of Apple's stubbornness and closeness, they forced people to make stuff that is USB class compliant. And if something is USB class compliant, it's most likely also going to work on Linux. But that's only one part of it. I think there's tons of interfaces that work because they are class compliant, but then they still don't come with software, so you cannot configure the routing and stuff. What I did, and this kind of, like, it feels like, sometimes I ask myself, why do people

even ask themselves what to take? But then it's also a little bit unfair, because what I did, I chose an interface that can be configured entirely on the hardware. That's why I don't use any software at all. And that's also, you know, sometimes I think like maybe I am, I am cheating a little bit with my claim that Linux music production is amazing because I just, I think I did my homework in that sense that I chose stuff that is really simple and makes no problems. So I have an RME Fireface and that's a multi-channel interface. With class compliance, you also have some

limitations like you can only have 24 inputs, I think, and the interface would support more. But it's not a problem for me. It might be a problem for others, though, right? So yeah, I think the hardware is still difficult. And FocusRite, I know there is like an open source driver. There's a FOS initiative, actually, and they have also the backing of FocusRite. Like FocusRite, I think, provides all the units to test. So if you get a FocusRite interface, then you even have a nice software router where you can root. Yeah, this is done as of about two years ago according to this Reddit post.

Yeah, yeah. So there is the really simple stuff that doesn't need software, right? And then the complicated things, I think RME is a good option because it's really high end and you can configure everything on the unit. But then again, you know, like some people say I will never touch the unit. It's crazy like with shift and menus. And for me, it's okay because I wanted to use Linux. I wanted to do that. And then I just took this as a given.

I have to go this path, you know. But yeah, there are a couple of options now and there are even. some that have nice software. Yeah, I can understand the software being an issue as well. I'm looking at this from, like, the gaming side, and it has all of the same problems where, you know, you buy some fancy keyboard or some fancy mouse, and it's going to work.

You're going to be able to plug in the keyboard, you know, plug in the mouse, and it works. But then, you know, it might have a bunch of macro keys. It might have a bunch of light configuration stuff, and all of that is done with some software. that's just not available on Linux. And sometimes, like, I buy Logitech stuff because there is good support on Linux.

But there's so many other things out there where there's probably nothing available and you just can't really do as much as you want to do with it. Great example of this as well as my Elgado Stream deck. This is my Macropad. And I'm very happy that as of a couple of years ago, there is an open source driver for this that lets you do basically everything you want to do.

do. But for a long time, it was just an expensive paperweight. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's in general a problem. I think that you have on Linux that you have to accept for the time being. I think it will improve, of course, in all kinds of areas. But you have to check if the stuff really works on Linux, right? And many, like, I also have a stream deck, for instance. And I even had to choose out of three different options, open source options, to use it. And it was actually amazing. I was really happy that this is the case. But yeah, I think this is something, I mean, I switch to Linux also out of idealism, right? I just realized that Apple develops into a mega corporation that I don't really vibe with anymore.

And then I realized just like sometimes things take a while. Now I think like why did I stay so long on macOS? But so I wanted to do something good and this could be painful. And for me, that was no problem. So I think if you don't are willing to at least go some rocky paths, then maybe you have to wait a year longer or so, yeah. So when we're looking at plugins, my understanding is there's multiple different plugin frameworks?

Is that what they are? Plug-in APIs? Yeah. So, I mean, there's plug-in standards. on one side, like there's LB2, for instance, which would be the native Linux plugin format. Then there is Steinberg's VST, VST2, and VST3 actually. They also both run on Linux.

And then there is clap that also runs on Linux. Clap is relatively new. It's also an open source framework. And so basically these are the standards, right? And then you have, as a developer, you have the option to, of course, you can either program everything yourself, or you can use a framework like choose.

And there's a number of these frameworks now that you can use for plugin development. And I think choose, I have no numbers, but I think choose is probably the most widely used one. And so if, but yeah, again, if you want to start to write Linux plugins, then you have tons of options, but if you already have your plugins,

let's say for macOS and Windows, then there might be situations where it's not so easy for you to port them to Linux, but in most cases it's actually really only a decision to check some boxes to also have Linux builds made. And then, of course, you have to test them and stuff, yeah. And as of recording this, about two weeks ago, VST3 also went open source under an MIT license, which is very cool to see.

Absolutely, absolutely. You know, many people hope that this will allow the developers to make more easily, to make more Linux builds. And there's also people who think this is a response, actually, to the rise of clap. I am not sure. I think what can be problematic is if you, before it was like propriety and open source. So it was hard for you to make only open source plugin, basically. But now I think it should be easier.

And who knows, maybe this will help many developers to support Linux easier or to support open source easier. I don't know. But I think most of the people don't really like VST, VST3 or VST2, and they're actually happy if something like Clap gets more successful. But I think it's great nonetheless, yeah. Yeah, you mentioned Clap having some effect here, and I opened up a Reddit post,

and literally the first top comment is, if all Clap managed to achieve was this, then it's been worth it. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. this has a big effect. So my understanding is you can also, there's also a way to run plugins that are not natively available

on Linux? Absolutely. I mean, you know, like in gaming, I think from gaming, probably many people also know bottles. And where you just, I mean, in the beginning, I use bottles to run some of the plugin managers that were only available on macOS or Windows, actually only to be able to sell licenses

to people that bought my old licenses. So I installed these little programs, these helpers, and could use them on Linux. But some of them would not work. And I think it's pretty much also what sums up the situation with the plugins. Like if you're willing to tweak a little bit and try a little bit, then you can make a lot of these plugins work. Some of them also work really easily.

Most of the people use Yabridge, I think, which is based on wine. And, you know, there's even people who believe that, We need something like a proton for plugins, something that is really highly polished and basically eats all of the plugins and makes them available on Linux. I am not sure. I think we are almost too deep inside with native plugin support that something like this will be necessary in the future. But still, yeah, it's already possible.

I see people who use almost all their Windows plugins on Linux. And there are some things that, you know, when they get updated. then they break. And that's also something that, you know, on Mac OS and Windows, most of the plugin companies, they come with, they have their installer applications. And I think, I don't know, maybe you can imagine that this stuff is often like not really high end and a little bit of a patchwork.

Right, right. And I'm super happy that I don't have to deal with this on Linux so far. And that's also the reason, I guess, why some of them do not work with wine bottles or Yabridge or whatever, yeah. So it's, there's definitely stuff you have to worry about, but it's not an insurmountable task to learn how to do all of this stuff on Linux. No, I think, you know, I think something that might be problematic is many musicians are used to work with like, for instance, pro tools, which is also something that is considered like an industry standard. and they are used to like if someone sends them a project and they don't have the plugin that they can just go ahead buy the plugin and then work with that session.

And those are things that you might run into a wall when you're on Linux. But if you're like me who mostly does music for themselves, then you can make decisions and you can say that's okay if I don't have this. And yeah, but you can work around it, I think, if you're more independently working. But if you're collaborating with a lot of people, then I think it can be problematic in certain situations. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, if, you know, it's the whole thing with, it's the same thing in like graphic production, right? If your entire team makes use of Photoshop and there's one person who's like trying to do things on Linux, like this is just not going to happen.

Like this, your entire workflow is tied to that and trying to pass things around through different systems is going to, like, you might. be how to do it, but you're probably going to cause something to break. Yeah, exactly. And you're, going to be the annoying guy who works with Linux. But yeah, I think in audio, like for instance, nowadays, I work with many people that I send projects back and forth. And I just consciously try to not use anything that they might not have. Or, you know, in audio, it's also like most of the stuff is real time, but then you can also render it so that the people don't need to have the plugins and I never have problems even if people send me stuff usually I just make them aware that if they use something really fancy that they should render it so that I have it and and like

that it's no problem for me but again you you have to think about more things than if you would be on Mac or Windows. Okay so let's talk about the plugin initiative. I guess when did that start? actually not long ago I think it's maybe a year old now and I had this idea for quite a while and you know I am I think I'm how would you call that I think I believe in things that are not realistic I am very optimistic oftentimes and so when I when I saw that there's actually a bunch of amazing plugin developers already supporting Linux like you he or tall audio software and stuff like that I felt they could have maybe an interest to also motivate other developers and help them with their problems and etc so that initially was the idea my idea was to create some sort of a hub where knowledge could be gathered and then shared with other developers and i think this happens to some extent that these developers help each other but then again most of them still don't see linux as a priority for many of them it's really no effort they just make the builds and they have some sort of a disclaimer on their website that there is limited support for linux or that is like a permanent beta diversion or whatever. And so they kind of guard themselves and to not have too big of an obligation. But that was the initial idea. And then it turned into something a little different. So I reached out on Mustadon to other Linux audio musicians and asked them if they would help me

to come up with an FAQ about the topic. And it turned out that I also did not know enough about all of these stuff. And actually, the great thing on Musterton was that many actually what would be the word illustrious developers from the open source world that really make amazing stuff in the audio field actually reached out and helped me to make this FAQ and then I started to make a logo and a little website and I always because I always was talk already in contact with the developers I asked them if they would be willing to do interviews so we started to do interviews and now it's almost like it's it's a big chunk of my day to work on this project and I am still not sure if it's ideal because initially I wanted to actually make it much more open that people can easier help also to work on the project but I still haven't figured out how to do this even on the website I'm not

I only have knowledge in the front end basically so some of the stuff is a bit patchy behind the scenes and I actually thought in the beginning that I could establish this as an open source project and everyone can help everyone can contribute but so far it's mostly me who is trying to do my best to get more developers on board and also kind of I also have a section where I portray artists so also get this a little bit more in the spotlight but now you know we talked

already about it like oh did we have a disconnect hello hello hello Are we back? I think we're back. Oh, good, good. Yeah, I just wanted to say, like, now I'm actually, the initiative is called Linux audio plugin development, right? But I realize it could actually be, it probably would be better if it would be just Linux audio development

because that would also include the whole hardware side of things. Now I'm really focusing on. the plugins and i try to portray the musicians but i i kind of i'm thinking about to maybe modify it a little make it a little more open and also include the hardware topic because i also realize this is something that people really stumble over in the beginning they're not not like me who think oh i found something perfect they they also want to have like a wide range of available options to choose from right well especially if they have a they already have something sort of workflow already. It's one thing if you're starting from scratch and you're starting on

Linux, but if you already have some workflow already, then you kind of want everything you already have to be in a working state. Absolutely. And you know, that's also funny. And I'm not sure if I am like, if I can relate from myself to other people. But for me, it was also like this in the beginning when I switched from Mac OS, I tried to find a replacement for every little tool I used on Mac. And I found something in most cases, but most of these things kind of faded out after a while. So now, like after Manjara, after this time with Manjara, I reinstalled my machine from scratch with Arch Linux and I basically did not install any of these tools anymore. It's very naked now.

I don't need all of these things anymore. I realized like this is maybe nice to have, but I don't need it. And I'm not sure if the journey could be similar for other people. I don't know because I think also when you are in this world in this Mac ecosystem or Windows ecosystem where it just flooded with options you tend to do a lot of things

that are actually not necessary right it's like you have all of these things available so you might as well use them yeah in a way right yeah and I also noticed like when you have so many tools at hand and that's also my standpoint with the you know

the audio video Linux distributions that come packed with tons of apps. I think you have so many tools and you know all of them only a little bit, but none of them like in their entirety. So yeah, nowadays I feel more like, even I feel like I am working for an initiative that I actually don't believe in because I believe in you don't need so many plugins. But yeah. So what sort of success has the initiative,

had so far? I have this list on the website that is like, oh, sorry, I have this list on the website that is like a Linux support request tracking. And there you basically see that I think we had five successes so far, like where some vendors basically I reached out to them and they said, hey, you reached out at the right time. This is actually amazing. Let's do this, you know. And most of them, they actually come with a whole bunch of tools.

So when they started to develop their plugins also for Linux, that meant like 13 new plugins or 16 new plugins, or in some cases even more. But if you look at the list in its entirety, there's also quite a few who right away rejected Linux. Most of them basically say, you know, if there was a real demand, then we would look into it. And with that, they close the case.

And some of them, they are really, they even say like, I love Linux, you know, I even lose, use Linux for developing the plugins, and yeah, let's do this. And so with these, we have more, have had more success. And it's also just, it's not just me, right? There's many people who reach out to the developers and ask them for Linux support. And probably in some cases, it was really just a question of timing. And then they felt like, okay, come on, let's do this.

Many of them, yeah, are still, you sometimes even get the impression that an AI answered because it's like very generic, like, oh, wow, that's a really interesting. interesting request and I will pass it to the developers and stuff like that. And with many of them, you're really hanging in the air. You have no idea what their stance actually is. And then there's also some, quite a few actually, who use a copyright protection system called ILOC. I'm not sure if you heard about it.

Yeah, I was reading through the FAQ. Yeah. Yeah. And for these, it's just end of the line, right? As long as they use ILOC, they cannot support Linux. and so a bunch of them actually at least they say they would like to support Linux but they just can't because they are right now like invested in this copy protection mechanism yeah right okay so it's basically just like a DRM system yeah and it started off actually in

the beginning and I used it in the beginning it started off as a dongle right you had a USB dongle in the beginning I think it was even a PS2 dongle and then you had your plugins and it's actually a nightmare this system i don't know anyone who likes it i think also the developers if they are honest they don't like it but it seems to be relatively brutal and a good protection but um i can only tell you this like if you have to to switch your hard disk for instance and you had no chance to unregister your plugins then then they are basically screwed because they are registered to this old um hardware id and you have to contact support and And in some cases, they ask you for money to go through the process.

Like, it's really a nightmare. So, yeah, I'm happy to not have this. Your camera is out of focus, by the way. Oh. Better now? No. No? Actually, I don't know what I can do.

It's this all automatic logitech stuff. Oh, maybe put you, sometimes putting your hand in front of the camera and then maybe. Yeah, that worked. Magic. Great. Good, good. I had no idea about this iLock system this I read the FAQ I didn't actually look properly into it I didn't realize it was that crazy so like it's actually hardware locking

the plug that's okay right but and you know there's some people that use it as an advantage because what you can do like for instance if you have a bunch of computers or you run around between those computers you can basically just bring your key and you switch it to whatever computer you switch it you can use all your plugins but again i i think yeah it's and they even think it's it's actually um like something that is nice i don't know uh i i think it's just um dangerous right um i had many situations with i look in the past where i really had like two or three days i could not work because i was figuring out how to fix this because i like on i had with apple it's always like that you go to the to the apple store and they tell you

you, oh, motherboard needs, I think they call it logic board. Logic board needs to be replaced, right? And then all your plug-in licenses are basically locked. Later on, they introduce something that is called iLoc Cloud, where you have the stuff in a cloud. But that's also something very weird. Some of the plugins you buy, they do not accept the cloud. Some of them only work with the key, and it's just like a whole best.

So they're sort of like, they introduced that, but there's not been a full adoption of it yet so you kind of have this mix and match of what does and doesn't support it so it's it's just it's just a big mess basically is the best way to put it i mean i i don't want to offend anyone who likes it but i really don't like it and anyone i've ever asked about it they they roll their eyes and they yeah right away they they really hate it so i don't know maybe there's people who really like it i don't know no i understand i don't okay i don't like that there's going to be a system like this, but I understand that if a system like this exists, being able to just plug in a device and it just transfers the licenses over like that,

I understand why that would be convenient. I get that. I just don't like the existence of the system to begin with. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, plug in copy protection and in general software copy protection, I think is a little bit an issue because, let's say the company shuts down and then the challenge response server doesn't work anymore and you basically bought software that you cannot authenticate anymore. So I think if it's iLock or anything else, it's problematic anyway. So you can just, but then again, also software doesn't get that old nowadays. So after a while it's obsolete anyway.

So I don't know. So have any of the, besides ILOC, have any of the developers had, issues with like wanting to support it because obviously they might not want to support it because there's just not enough people to monetarily justify it that sure whatever but have you been told any technical reasons why they might not want to do so yes yes many many people say like for instance they use juice but they wrote some custom made libraries that basically their plugins heavily depend on and they are not platform agnostic so they are basically locked for macOS or windows and if they would like to support Linux they would have

to substantially invest time to rewrite those libraries and stuff so that is i had that maybe five or six times that people say we actually cannot do it because it's too much work for us okay that that that makes sense um and that sort of just comes down to they would do it if there was enough justification. If there was enough people in that space, if there was enough money to make it viable, they would be more than happy to make it platform agnostic. But until that is the case, then I get it. Absolutely. And also what I often hear is that we have no one in the team who has any idea about Linux. I hear that really often. And that's actually very sad because then I usually offer them in my utopian way of looking at things. I could be that person.

for free. But yeah, they usually don't want that risk and they just, yeah, they don't do it. Yeah. No, I get that. If that's just a, that's just a problem that's going to happen, right? Like, if you don't have the technical expertise to do it and then you've got to hire someone to bring it on, it's, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. But you know, something else that is actually interesting that I learned also through this initiative is, you know, like with servers, anyone I think who has a little idea of computers knows that Linux is a big thing, right? Linux and open source is a big thing. And actually in my, like in this position that I'm in, I'm in asking people to support Linux where there's only a very small market and people believe it's really super niche, you know.

It's actually not true because most of the hardware stuff for music actually runs Linux. And there are some people who specialize in this. I think Elk Audio, if I remember, they make an operating system that is entirely intended to be used on like, how do you say, like low performance efficient hardware to actually power hardware devices that make music stuff. And then there's even crazier things. Like there is, I think probably one of the most widely adopted DAW's Ableton's life. and they have a standalone unit that runs live and it's actually running on Linux. So they have life as Linux version,

but they choose to not release it to the public. They choose to not support the platform even though they have it actually. That kind of makes sense. So there's some use of it for the actual devices. Like it's an embedded device. That like makes perfect sense why that would be the case.

But it's, yeah, I, again, like, it's just, like a lot of things, you have Linux sort of, every single company that might say we don't want to support Linux, like 99% chance they're using Linux somewhere in their development stack, whether it be their web server,

their build server, like Linux is involved somewhere. It's just, they don't want to bring it into, like the main thing they're providing. Yeah, I think it's in general also the problem that many open source projects have, right? Like people like to take it. And if the license allows it, they even basically white label it and use it for something else. But if someone asks for something in return, then it's too complicated for them. They cannot be bothered.

So I, yeah, and I actually had quite a few conversations with developers that said, you know, actually how much I benefited. it from Linux, okay, let's do this, let's make Linux builds, even if there's only five users who use it, just out of idealism. And I think that, I mean, I think that's the right way to look at it, but of course I cannot decide for others. Everyone has to decide for themselves. Sure. And it also would depend on the complexity of the plugin. I'm sure the simpler ones, you know, that might take, I don't know, a week or so of work to get running on Linux are probably much easier to justify it in something where it's going to take

quite a lot of effort for the idealism sort of side of things if it's we just want to support it because it sounds cool to support when it's easier to do so like it's easier to justify that sure sure absolutely and then also I think on macOS and Windows there are some things

that I'm not even sure if they are technically so easily to implement on Linux like for instance there's a bunch a bunch of plugins that do inter-plugging communication. Basically, you have different channels in your track and you have different instances of the plugin and they can talk to each other. And I'm not even sure how they do that on Windows and Mac OS.

Certainly, me being stupid and using my DAW as a flat pack makes this impossible from the get-go. So I think there's also some plugins that use some patchy, hacky technology that might need to be reinvented for Linux in order to make it happened, yeah. Right, right, okay. Yeah, this goes back to it just not being platform agnostic. I would hope they're doing sensible, networky things that are fairly portable, but I think we've

all heard cases. And if you've ever looked at things like the leaked Windows XP source code, I think everyone kind of knows that when nobody is going to be seeing the code, people will do some things that probably are not the best of ideas. Yeah, yeah, I think that can be assumed. I even had, you know, like with my company where we made web applications with open source technologies, I was always like frustrated if something was not a nice solution, right?

And I said to the customer, you know, it works, but actually for us, it's frustrating because it's more like a workaround than actually a real solution, but there was not enough budget or whatever, not enough time. And many of the owners of other companies always told me, why do you worry? It works, right? And you got the money for it. It's okay. But I think as long as you really care for, also like my guys who were working on the

stuff, they were frustrated because they felt like we delivered actually crap. It's kind of working, but it was not something that we're proud of. And I think many developers, especially if you go back to these installers and stuff like that, I don't know, it's really just like crap in the end. So it kind of works, but it's frustrating, yeah, probably also to work on it. I don't know. So when you were first starting to get interested in Linux, what was the state of things in the audio space?

Hmm, hard to say. I think it was not so bad. There were a couple of issues with, you know, where. you had to restart the computer if you had no idea about pipe wires undermining and how they work like you were making music all of a sudden back audio was gone

and then you restarted and it would work for another couple of hours stuff like that in general I think it was already very good but there were like some yeah some things that you made and I have to be honest I mean there's box and crashes and stuff also on Mac on Windows so it's not that this was

something super special but it was a bit more than I was used to like little things like that. And also sometimes, you know, like when you open different projects, sometimes the sample frequency changes like from 44.1 to 48 or something like that. And that would maybe in some instances create like digital burst sounds like really crazy sounds that could also technically kill your speakers if you would listen to loud and stuff like that. But this is really all gone for me. I don't have any issues like that anymore. What I sometimes still have that I don't really understand

if it's like Wayland connected or whatever but what I sometimes have is that for instance drag and drop between two apps when you have for instance a sample browser app where you go through your audio library and you want to drag it into the DAW this may be working for two hours and then all of a sudden it doesn't work anymore

and in X11 you could just restart the session but with Wayland you have to log out, log in and so stuff like that sometimes I have to be honest there's little things like that that still sometimes happen and I don't really understand them in some cases. That's not just a your system thing. I do notice the same as well.

Like, I'll be going through working on some video stuff. I try to drag a thumb down to my browser and it just doesn't work. Who knows why? There's probably some log somewhere that's indicating an error, but I don't know what log it is or where it would be. So a lot of times I kind of just restart and works fine. then yeah it's also interesting like for instance i i was even dreaming of a screen saver like in the old days that actually just shows my journal ctl because i like to look at it and see what's going

on but um it's actually interesting for someone who is not that knowledgeable like myself that it's often not that easy to actually find um lock lock files that are that really help you in in a certain way like of course like if they properly lock to to journal ctl then it's nice but in many cases something behaves weird and you see nothing in no lock you don't know why you know yeah maybe they maybe they do have a log file but it's their own custom log file and they don't really indicate where it is so if you want to find it then you got to do some like deep dive on the internet like okay where does this application store the log file assuming somebody's ever cared to work that out and maybe you'll find some documentation on it there's yeah there's

There's pain points here and there, but I do like the fact that you can generally assume that there's going to be something somewhere, it might just not be obvious. Whereas on Windows, who knows, maybe they've, maybe they're doing something, maybe they're not. There's just, like on Windows and on MacQuest to some extent, there's less of an assumption that the user is going to want to dig into that lower level stuff. So often, yeah, oftentimes it's not as obvious where to find it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I agree. Like, for instance, I had this issue where I made a script to actually, when I launch OBS to connect my microphone and everything already.

And I don't know why it seems to be correct. And it works, but only for like half an hour and then the microphone disconnects. As to when I would just use Helbum and do the connection manually, it would be super reliable. And that's also in some of these, you know, like when you try to do something that makes your life easier, I most of the times don't do these things anymore because of little annoyances like that. And then later I learned that actually what I did is I rewrote basically the ID of the device while doing it. And that's the wrong way to do it. And so, yeah, like, if you want to do something smart, then you sometimes really have to dig deep and learn a lot in order to really make it happen.

And in other instances, you just create new problems that you didn't have before. So earlier you mentioned how when you first swapped over, you were trying to replace a lot of those things you had on macOS. So where were you when you first swapped Linux? So what were you using and what are those things that maybe you just thought, okay, I don't actually need them anymore? Yeah. So one thing, like I maybe just to begin with, I started to use Linux for maybe over a year just on a USB stick. I would put it in my MacBook. And when I was in the studio, I would put it in the Mac Pro and just boot from the stick. And that for me was already like so amazing. I used the same. stick on two different computers and just I basically experimented with Linux and then like after

a while I said okay let's do it just like cold plunge just use Linux and don't use Mac anymore and so on on Mac for instance I had an app that would make everything slightly blurry that is not in focus so that the app in the front would be basically sharp and nice and the rest would be a little bit like sapia and a little bit blurry. So in the beginning I had an odyssey of Gnome Shell extensions that I tested to kind of replicate this. And in like half baked, I could replace this. And also on Mac, something that I really liked was I actually don't even know what the name was. But I remember that the extension I found as a replacement was Q-Tile, where I had tons of keyboard shortcuts.

up to take like free windows and put them next to each other, something that a tiling window manager would do automatically, I did manually. And so these things I tried to replicate. Then I also had like a tool. I only remember the name on Linux input remapper on macOS. I don't remember the name anymore. That's really crazy.

I forgot most of my Mac time actually. But input remapper I used because I had a custom mechanical keyboard that had basically the same function keys on the left and on the right side so that I could use both fingers, both hands to press shortcuts. And this are used in the beginning as well. And now all of these things I don't use anymore. It's like, I don't know, I could still use them. There are replacements, but I decided to just exercise not to use them anymore. And now I'm super happy, actually. You just kind of got used to, you got two used to them having them on macOS and then you slowly sort of brought yourself more back to like a a simpler kind of

experience i guess i think also nowadays i'm not sure if that is unfair to say but i think like this mission center stuff in macOS in many ways doesn't really make sense to me anymore and it was like the same back then so i kind of had to have a bunch of tools that would allow me to do things that i needed, like put Windows in certain place. Like, I don't know if you ever, or if you remember how you had to hold the alt key while you press the plus icon to actually maximize the windows, you know, in Mac orways. If you would just press it, it would become a full-screen window. And if you press it again, it would just be small again.

And so there were a bunch of things like in the standard Mac window management thing that I didn't like. And so I found lots of little tools that made this more accessible. And I just realized, you know, when I came to Linux, in the beginning, I looked at KDE and Gnome. And then I felt like, OK, Gnome is more like Mac. I feel more comfortable using this. And after a while, I really started to dig this workflow with the overview and the workspaces.

And so I kind of didn't need all this extra stuff anymore. I think it was more that. I think nowadays when I am on the MacBook of my wife, I click command space and then I start to type something and then sometimes I click an icon in the dock but it would not bring the app to the front. I think it makes totally no sense and it's so much simpler on Gnome and I just got used to it. But actually I think I will probably depart from Gnome in the future because there are so many like delicious things to try. I have to try them I see you're using Neri I try to use Neri for a while as well

but not like intensely enough so that it was too complicated too cumbersome for me and then I but I want to revisit it and have a look at it closer there's a lot of stuff that I would like to play around with as well people have been I don't know if it's any good

people have been telling me about something called Mango WC I need to take a proper look at it still so I can't really comment on whether or not it's good but there's so many really cool projects out there that some people actively use, others they don't and unless you try things that you've not experienced before

you're not really going to know what you actually like. A lot of people, they get very comfortable on the first thing they use and it might be fine. That might be the greatest thing for you but there's other things out there and if you try other things you might realize that I didn't actually like where I started

I just was comfortable because it's the first thing I used and I used it so long that you know you get used to the things you don't like about it yeah absolutely I think in generally note that's also when when Bitwick introduced their touch interface

I was so interested to try this out and I was still on macOS that I got myself a surface device, a Microsoft surface. I think, I don't know, it was the first or second generation. And that was basically my first deep dive experience with Windows. And for as long as I can think, I always felt like Windows is so miserable. But then in a way, I started to give it a chance, use it a little bit. And even though I still think it's miserable, but then some of the things started to be less miserable, the longer I use them, you know. And even some of the things I felt, oh, they actually should have something like that on Mac or it's,

you know, like the window snapping or stuff like that. And yeah, I think you need to have time to, like I installed Neri. I played around with it a little bit and then I realized, oh, this is going to take much more time than I have and I discarded it again. But I am sure if I would invest more time in it, then there would be certainly aspects that I think, oh, man, this is so amazing. And how could I live without this before, right?

And then you have to weigh things in and then decide what to move forward with. But in Linux, it's crazy. You could try something every day and you would need to have a lot of time. But, yeah. So you mentioned you started with Manjaro. What brought you to that? So actually, I read a lot about Linux and like my understanding back then was just like if you really know something about Linux,

then you use Arch Linux. And I was already a little bit intimidated just from going to the Arch website. I felt like this is so nerdy, everything. Then I started to look into the ArchWiki and I felt this is probably too much for me. So I started to look for arch-based distributions, right? And I don't know why, but I think back then

I got the impression that Manjaro is not a corporation. It's a community project. It's arch-based. It's intended to be a simple arch-experience. experience. And I felt like this is a good point to start. I found it extremely ugly, the green stuff. So I had the first thing I had to do is uninstall all the Manjaro specific stuff. But it was really good for me because I could, you know, like for instance, the easy way that you can switch between kernels and stuff like that, I enjoy to learn a lot about these things.

And I always referred to the arch wiki. And I never had any issues actually because I never used the A-U-R. I used it one and actually broke it one time. I wanted to have hardware acceleration again after it got removed. And then I took some package and actually ended up with a black screen after boot. But I just want to say, like, for me, it was a good soft entrance into Arch. Maybe it was not the best option. I think maybe there are better options to start with.

But I still love the fact that I had to spend so much. time with the ArchWiki and learn about stuff and then actually also really understood what I did in the end. And when I finally installed Arch, I had five attempts. I screwed it up five times. But then when I installed, they really felt like now I'm ready for Arch Linux. So when you swap to Arch, what was that experience like? Because a lot of people, they are very intimidated by it and it sounds like to some extent you were. So what? did it feel like sort of just starting from basically nothing? Hmm. I mean, I was in a special phase in my life. I just closed my company and we were about to move to

Thailand and they had time. So for me, it was actually, it was nice. I just, I had like, sometimes I had the laptop, sometimes I had the phone with the ArchWiki and I just basically followed the steps and learned about how to enable the Wi-Fi and all that stuff, you know. And I did so many things that I didn't even know that they happened behind the scenes. Like my keyboard needs to be actually defined. It's not automatically detected and stuff like that. So for me, it was really fun. But I think if I would not have had the time to do it, then maybe I would not have done it at all.

Because I think when you, like, let's say sometimes I do this, sometimes I decide I need to reinstall my computer and then I know I will have two days that I'm not productive and I just make that decision and I go for it. But with Arch I think it took me maybe a week or so to actually get it completed like with learning and then messing up and learning again. And I also sometimes had the feeling now it's working, but I think I maybe screwed up something. So let's start from scratch, you know. And yeah, I think because I had the time, it was amazing. Other ways probably I would have, like the same with Neri. Otherwise, I would have probably said, oh, man, this is too complicated.

I go back to Manjaro. Now we are recording again. Maybe Linux does have problems. I mean, all computers have, I guess. Yeah. I'm not totally sure what happened there, but yeah. Anyway, moving on from that. Where were we before we got sidetracked by whatever happened there? The experience to install Arch, basically. No, I mean, for that to happen. Yeah, absolutely. For me, it was great to go through this procedure. It's not that I remember all of it.

I would need to consult the wiki again, if I would do it again. But after felt like I went through it clean, I actually was proud and happy. And still, you know, the first couple of times updating, I felt like, oh, maybe this is dangerous. Because on Manjara, what I always did is before updating, I would go and read in the forum. They have this release announcements, right? So I would read and then people say, oh, I have this problem, this problem. And I already felt like this is going to be a dangerous update or it's going to be an easy update. But now, I don't know. I think it's also like an addiction. I run my computer. I start my computer. I run the updates. And of course, I read what is going to be updated. And in many cases,

I don't really understand what these libraries do. Right, right, right. But if there is something that I really see, oh, I really depend on this, then I might go and look at the news and read a little bit about it before I update. But, yeah. Yeah, like if it's, you know,

I'll do the same thing with OBS. If I see an OBS update come through, I'm like, okay, well, what are we actually changing here? Is this going to break a plugin? You know, there's been times where they've done some big API rewrites and then every single OBS plugin and just stopped working.

I was like, ah, let's not do that one today. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and sometimes, you know, like sometimes I do a change and I feel it's actually good. And then later on, I realized this little thing that I didn't notice before is actually because of that change. Like in one instance, like I read the pipewire description, like the, sorry, the article in the arch wiki about pipewire. And I saw that you can actually change the note names. So I don't have these cryptic, crazy interface names anymore, so it can have nice names. I thought, let's do that.

I did it. And after a while, I realized that this actually causes always the audio engine in the DAW to just crash after a while. And I felt like this is the DAW's fault. But then it turned out that this was actually that change that I did. And so, yeah, now I'm a little bit cautious with stuff like that. And I think it's normal, no, like sometimes you do an update. and you don't initially realize that there's something different or something not working anymore. But usually I have to say it's crazy.

I update all the time and it feels like even even the thought that not all the components individually get updated to me feels wrong. So for me, this rolling model is now just the normal state and I never have problems actually. Not so far at least. Yeah, people look at Arch. Even Linux people look at Arch and are kind of intimidated. certain cases. Like, oh, things are updating all the time. That means things must be breaking all the time. And there's definitely cases where things will break. And the more things you have installed, obviously, the more likely that something can break, you just have a higher

surface area. But I'll maybe have one, like, real big problem a year, maybe. And even then, it's not that big of a deal. And usually, by the time that I'm seeing, because I usually wait a couple of days to do an update, someone's already talking about it. There's a forum post or a Reddit post or something about it or a news post about it. And I already know how to fix it. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, same, same.

Yeah, usually everything works just fine. And if there's a problem, then you find help somewhere. The most recent issue that I had that I don't fully understand is that on my laptop, I have a media tech Wi-Fi card. And after an update, the firmware was just gone. The folder with the firmware for this card was gone. I had no more Wi-Fi. And then I reverted the package.

And actually, I think, two or three updates later, it was still like that. And then the fourth update reintroduced it somehow. Maybe it's not that widely used. But, yeah, I also didn't find too many people that had the same problem. But the firmware directory was just empty. Um, I don't know. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure what would have happened there. But it was easy enough to revert

So yeah It was also good for me because I never did this before I never reverted the package before So it was actually nice to do it Yeah I don't think I've ever I don't think I've ever had to do so either Maybe I want something to break Just so I can have something to talk about

No no No it's okay when it works Oh definitely definitely Um, yeah, this is, it's, it's nice to be able to use it as a learning experience, but when it's something you desperately need to function right now, yeah, um, that, that's definitely not pleasant. Yeah. I think around pipewire, for instance, something that I, that, that I would really appreciate would be, um, more flexible UI tools because still I do a lot of the things in, in, in, in the terminal. Like, for instance, to connect this microphone from the multi-input interface that it's

connected to, I cannot do it in Helbum for whatever reason, so I have to do it in the terminal. But I think that and the ability to actually save setups, like save certain states and recall them. That would be amazing, you know? Yeah, I've actually spoken with the wire plumber developer, and that is something that he's definitely interested in. Like, because right now, I use QPW Graph for doing everything.

So, like, if I have my, um, my capture card for my console, I will route the audio from that to my speakers, or I'll take the audio from my mic and then route it into a jack client in OBS.

And QPWGraph remembers all that state. But there's no state the pipe wire or wire plumber holds. So there are, You can run scripts, you can make tools to do it for you, but it would be nice if there was just a way to say, hey, link this node to this node, and then immediately upon starting wire plumber

or whenever it sees those two nodes available, it just does it for you. That would make things really, really convenient. Yeah. And you know, pipe wire is much more powerful than people know, because, like, for instance, on Linux, I said earlier that the class-compliant interfaces have this 24-channel input limitation.

But what you can do, which is actually really crazy, but it's, of course, it needs the implementation on the DAW side and the DAW side. Like Bitwig, for instance, you can have, like, let's say you have four different interfaces and each of them has 24 inputs. You can combine them as one interface and it's actually a pipewire doing this. Pipwire integration in Bitwig allows you to do these combined interfaces. So you can actually pump up this limitation. And I don't know if you can do this on any other operating system.

easily. I can also have like a USB microphone, the webcam audio, the interface, everything combined in one interface and just use it and record stuff, vice versa. It's just amazing. I mean, and it's a little bit cumbersome in the sense that the UI tools are not that highly polished, but the capabilities are actually crazy. So, yeah, on that note, what is something you would like to see available that just isn't a thing yet? For the longest time, I wanted to have a really, really high-end audio editor,

just where you can load audio files and edit them. I got used to use Audacity, and Audacity is like going to update soon, and I think it's going to be probably amazing. But for the longest time, I was hoping for Acoustica from Aiken Digital to come to Linux, something like that, some really high-end audio editor.

And I also hear that often that people, you know, like you can do batch editing and stuff like that batch conversion and things that nowadays I use FFMPEC and stuff like that. I got used to it. But if you come fresh to Linux, you would probably miss something like that. And I'm not sure if I would start to use it again, but for a long time, I really was missing something like that. And then I have a couple of plugin manufacturers like Sugarbytes that I really want to come to Linux. And they are specifically the ones that say they would if they have. the knowledge. But other than that, I have to say, I'm happy. I can do what I need to do. And I recently realized this that when I'm making music, I have no consciousness about being on Linux.

I'm just making music. It's just amazing. I think that's a good position to be in where it's like the tool feels like it gets out of your way and just lets you do the work you want to to do. I think this is probably part of the reason why people recommend Macs and why people use them, right? Because it, for a lot of people, it does feel like the tool gets out of their way. The difference with Linux is you've kind of got to do that initial setup first, and then once you've done that, then you're in that same position. But that initial setup to some people, as I was saying earlier, can feel intimidating. Yes, absolutely.

But I also really don't know what could be the solution to this because this is in one way a disadvantage, but also a very big advantage. So I don't know. I think people are not wrong when they say that users would adopt Linux if it would just come pre-installed on their laptop because they usually just use what's on it. And I also, you know, like sometimes when we have visitors here, I give them one of the laptops that has Linux on it. It's actually an Arch Linux laptop that has Gnome on it, but they never complain. They just use it. And I think if you would take out the complexity of having to remove Windows and install Linux or dual boot, like I often, I never did it, right?

But I often hear like, oh, it's so amazing Linux, this and that. Oh, now, fuck Windows screwed up my dual boot setup. I never had to go through this experience, but I guess it's super frustrating. And I think all of this, if they would not have to go for it. this, they probably would just use it and would be happy with it. I am regarding the dual boot thing. I used to dual boot myself, but I never had dual booting set up in my bootloader. I would do the consistently working approach, but not exactly sensible approach of just swapping my boot drive in the boot, in like in the

UEFI, in the BIOS. Okay. That always worked. Nothing ever broke there. I didn't get a nice, fancy interface that told me, oh, this is the Windows one, this is Linux, but I just knew what the drives were, and it always worked. So for anyone who wants to dual boot and never have any problems, that's probably the easiest way to handle it.

Yeah, I guess so. And that just reminds me of something, you know, some things I really just gave up on. Like, for instance, I had this with Group, and then now I also have it with System Dboot, that on the 4K display, the boot menu is just tiny. And I tried, like, so many times I said to myself, okay, now let's take an hour

and fix this, but I never was able to fix it. Little things like that. I don't know how to fix it. I just I have a 10 of the display and I just know that buying anything that is anything higher

than that is going to cause problems. So, I just don't want to deal with it. Just for problems like that and you know, just regular window scaling problems and every little problem that could possibly come along, I will let everybody else deal with it, and maybe in 10 years from now when everything is hopefully resolved, then I'll deal with it.

Yeah, yeah. But, you know, also, like, you do stuff like that. Like, for instance, I had to learn about Edit, like EDI, you know, because I bought a little monitor. My idea was I have this monitor when I record videos and on this monitor I have OBS so that I can check what I'm actually doing because sometimes I would record for two hours and not realize that after five minutes. OBS crashed.

So I have this little monitor, and it's really amazing. Like, when I record videos, I set the scaling to 150% only on the large screen so that people see something when I record. And as soon as I shut down this little monitor, magically everything goes back to how it was before that. So these little things where you realize, like, there's so much polish already in all of these things. Like I have 4K on one, like 1080P on the other display, different scaling factors, and when I shut down one of the monitors, everything goes back to normal how it was before.

It's just amazing. Yeah, I don't, I didn't even know that was a thing. I just, yeah, I don't use mixed DPI or anything like that. So all of my, all my displays are just fairly consistent. So I don't I assume that's like a fancy Gnome thing. Yeah, that's cool. I guess it's probably Nome, yeah. And yeah, are you using Wayland or X-11? Neri is on Wayland, so Wayland at this point. Yeah, you're right.

You're right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I have lots of issues because of Wayland. For instance, yeah, like I wanted to have my mouse follow in OBS when I press a keyboard so that I can zoom in. but with Wayland and two monitors, you get crazy artifacts on the corners. It's only with Wayland, things like that. And so I just decide to not use these things. But yeah, that's a little bit the price you have to pay when you always use the latest thing, right?

But I guess it's a Gnome issue, actually. I guess probably other desktop environments or window managers don't have that same problem. I know there are, there's Zoom issues on Gano. My understanding is things are in a better state on KDE regarding that. But you did talk about wanting to try out other things. Like, what is, what is Ganoe maybe not doing for you? Or what have you seen others have the, like, just looks interesting? Well, to be honest, I just don't like to have to use extensions.

What I would like to use is just a system that does what I need. And to be honest, I don't like the visual appearance of Cosmic. But other than that, feature-wise, it would do exactly what I want. I would like to have the ability to have some workspaces where it auto-tiling and some workspaces where I can push around windows or, like, move them with some shortcuts. I am really compelled to try this. And also, I'm not sure if this is just a feeling thing, but I think Gnome also carries a bunch of old baggage that maybe something new like Cosmic doesn't have, but I never tried it. I only watched videos so far.

And Neri, I think, is just beautiful how the animations and everything and the workflow is. I'm not sure if it would translate to the 4K 32-inch display, but Neary I would like to try. Hyperland, I tried, but it's just too complicated for me. I think it takes too much time to set up so that I really have what I need. And the reason why I chose Gnome or why I stick so long with Gnome also is because of the many little beautiful apps. I think the LibAdvita ecosystem is really nice, although I don't like the whole issue with the theming and the whole, like, the tons of problems that come with these decisions that they make.

So I have to see, I think I will probably not stick with Gnome in the future. That's my feeling at the moment. Well, regarding Cosmic, their first stable release is right now marked for December 11th. So if you want to try it out then, I don't know, from my experience doing the early testing, doing bug reporting for it, it's gotten a lot better. There's still a couple of issues here and there. There's most of the crash issues are dealt with at this point. It's just a couple of things where, you know, the first version of anything is always going to be a little bit unpolished. There's going to be areas where, hey, there's a feature missing here that seems like it should be.

here, hey, there's some weird design decision. These are just like natural things of a first release. And I'm sure once they've done the first one, it goes stable. They have more people testing it. Then that's when you're going to have a lot of those things identified and ironed out. Yeah, absolutely. It's just, you know, I realize that for instance, I would like to have a system that has no window decorations. And that makes me realize that I would have to probably get rid of most the apps that I'm used to use every day. And it feels like something that I want to do. But again, I probably would need some time like when I installed Arch.

And then I think I can make it. Maybe around Christmas, who knows, maybe I have some time to try it out. Yeah, I don't know. I think it's always worth trying it out. And at the end of the day, I tell people, if you don't like it, you can always just go back to the thing you've had before. You don't have to delete all of your settings and configuration and everything you are using.

You can just go back to it. Yeah, my understanding is actually I could just install the cosmic session and basically for a while use all the same apps that I use just with the cosmic window management, so to speak, right? Yeah, I've not tried to install both Gnome and Cosmy alongside each other. I know there have been some issues with having KDE in Cosme alongside because KDE does, remember how I was saying earlier about, you know, you have these big corporate projects where they do weird things just people don't look at the code. The same thing happens when you have a code base that's over 30 years, almost 30 years old. There's going to be some weird legacy design decisions from 25 years ago where nobody assumed you would be running, you know, a second desktop alongside your main one, where a lot of those problems have been ironed out.

I don't know of any major ones now, but there have been issues like that where KDE was saving files in a location that it probably shouldn't have been saved. files in and it was causing weird overwrites by doing whatever it was doing but yeah this is this is just kind of like what naturally happens when you have a big project that's been around for a long time right there's always going to be these these areas where things could be improved especially areas where you may even touched it in over a decade yeah absolutely yeah and i'm also like you know even though I know I could go back, I know from other experiences that usually I don't go back to backups. I usually then decide to, okay, you know what, let's clean install. And so, yeah, I'm kind of

hesitant to try to run it both next to each other, even though I think in the arch wiki, it says that it should be possible with Gnome to have, but I'm not sure. I have to see. Yeah, that's, you're on arch, right? Like, you're on arch, you can install whatever you want. So you might as well try it out. Exactly. So going back to the initiative, where would you like to see things get to long term? So long term, I think I need to learn more about how open source projects are management. And maybe I would like to maybe have someone to step in to help me with this, you know, to make this initiative really open and actually have more people help to manage it to.

And also maybe to extend the website a little bit to integrate more features that I currently have only in the back. I do them manually. So, yeah, that's one thing. And then the other thing is really I hope for a situation in the future where maybe some of the vendors will say that they will help, you know, like maybe write articles, how tos. because again I even in the in the FAQ that I did I had over the the first couple of weeks I had to change many things because they were playing out wrong you know my assumptions were just wrong and so I would hope for more know how to come in and I think on the vendor side and on the artist side people who I think you know it's again like what I said before when Apple drove the audio interface situation on Linux with their iPad iPhone stuff I think right now so many people don't want to use a US-based, a US corporation-based operating system that they are willing to try Linux. It's like, again, like a totally driver from an unexpected side, that I think this is going to increase anyways. So I don't think I have to do much there other than keep continuing

asking people for support. And I want to make more videos about it, want to show more. And also, I have to take time because I am, I know most. about Bitwick, for instance. And I also want to learn more about the pure Foss alternatives, because it just drags me there. I want to go more in that direction, but I also have to invest time to make, for instance, an art or review and stuff like that. So, yeah, the initiative, more help, more expertise.

And the rest, I think, is already, like, running, yeah. So do you have a way right now that people can help you out, or is that kind of like, you need to sort all that out. I completely need to sort that out. I mean, I have everything in a Git repository, but you know, like, just one example. I asked someone for help and they said, yeah, I help, no problem. Give me access to the Git repository and their feedback was like, oh man, this is so archaic. We have to change all of this.

And so in turn, instead of helping me, it was actually like creating problems that were not there before. And then the stack was so complicated that I couldn't get it to run on my system. them, et cetera, et cetera, and then it kind of, like, collapsed in itself. So I'm not saying that I'm not, I'm really willing to also remodel everything, but I also have to admit I'm not like super knowledgeable in some of these areas. Git, I also, I know the basics, right? I can use it. Like, for instance, there is these other projects, Linux door.

It's a, it's a directory of plugins. And I contribute plugins there, for instance. So this is really cool. You have a little read me on the website. They tell you what you need to do, and then you just basically make pull requests, add new plugins. I can imagine that I find out, and again, I also need to have just a little time to figure this out that I can imagine easy ways that people can help. Right now, I just have on my website an email template that people can copy and contact vendors about, telling them how great Linux is and that the adoption is growing, et cetera. but I need to figure out more ways how people actually can help

because right now everything is still just goes all through me and I think in the future it's probably not going to work like that. So right now the best thing that people can do is just reaching out to plug-in developers on your behalf, reach you out, hey, I use Linux, would you be interested in doing this? Just sort of showing that there is some interest in supporting these plugins because it's one thing for you to go and ask, yourself. But if other people are also asking for this, this shows that there are more people

than just you that want this to be done. Exactly. And right now what I do is in this email template that people can basically, because I also know that in many cases, like the vendors have questions and they have like doubts about things that could not work and etc. So to take this weight away from people, the email template basically says, hey, support Linux. And if you need help, reach out to amadeus and that's that's also what i'm willing to do i'm willing to help those people and to also try to answer some of the questions in the in the FAQ make the FAQ smarter maybe have some like some guides in the future and how to do like because many people also they they buy specific computers to make Linux builds and my understanding is that would not be necessary

you could also do that smarter maybe have guides on that yeah so i think um yeah there's many things to improve on in the future, but that's the most, that's the best thing that people can do right now is to basically go and ask for support. And also, again, as I said, not only plugins, but also hardware. Oh, we disconnected again, did we? Hello, hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.

Hello. Uh, okay, I'm gonna just gonna reload, because it looks like he's connected. I'm, yeah, I'm gonna reload. Oh, and he's gone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I think. What? Um...

Um... Wait. He's alone in the call. Hello? Strange, I don't know what happened. I think you... One of us deced, and it didn't reconnect the call, even though we're on the same. Cool. I don't know.

So I think the last thing you were saying was something about hardware. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I said in the beginning that I think I should maybe make the initiative a bit broader. Because I realize that there's software, like standalone software that people would like to see on Linux, that I also could target with it. And then, of course, the hardware thing. So maybe I am going to modify it. a little bit. It's not that well known yet so that I can still do changes like that. And yeah, that's actually it. People can just reach out to whatever vendor they think should support Linux and point them to me and I will try to help. Okay. Yeah, I'm really interested to see sort of where this ends up going. And whilst this isn't

a space that I personally am that invested in, I generally like there to be more. support for things on Linux. Like that's that's just ultimately a good thing because the more support there is for things like this, the more support there's going to be for other things that I am personally interested in like the gaming space and like general computing peripherals because as there's more people who are just generally using Linux, there's, you know, more people using Linux, right? So it's just a bigger audience and it's not like it's not like people who have one interest are only involved in that one interest. So, there's generally going to be some sort of overlap and this sort of push to bring more and more

things in line. Exactly, yeah. That's also how I see it. I think there's many areas that could need better Linux support. And I personally am convinced that it will happen. But again, sometimes I'm a little bit over-positive. So we will see. But I think we all contribute to it by using it and being vocal about it.

And like nowadays, like in the beginning, I would not have recommended anyone of my friends to use Linux. Nowadays, I tell them, I can help you set up the computer and then you're good to go. You can just do what you did before. It's not going to be a problem. So now I am pretty confident to also tell people start using it, you know. So there are these other projects and websites like you're mentioning with Linux door before. You talked about the millisecond project. Have you tried reaching out to these various tools?

in the Linux space to, you know, I don't know, help each other out in various ways? Actually, I have not done consciously. So, there's actually a good point, you know, to the Linux musician forum, to Linux audio.org. Yeah, actually, I should do that. I haven't done so. Maybe also because I am kind of shy and, like, this thing is still very small. And like in the beginning, I noticed that there's lots of things that need to be ironed out. but now I think it's actually in a good enough state to reach out to people.

But still, I think I want to make it more open. Because, you know, ultimately, I would like to live in this world that I have in my head, this dream world where almost everything is open source. So right now I still, like even my own initiative is not open source. So I think I need to do some homework there. But then I definitely want to reach out to all those people. Yeah, I think it makes sense because you'll generally have. the same goal of we want there

to be better audio production on Linux so it just logically makes sense to I don't know whether it be share resources or get other people involved in helping out but I understand also wanting to just sort of get the project properly established

as an open thing first so you're not the one doing everything because I'm sure there are other people who would like to get involved and like to help out who right now you know kind of hard to do so yeah absolutely and i need to find i need to think about ways how this can be done easily so that it's also fun to help to contribute right um yeah yeah i think i i have to do some some some some homework first and then this thing can grow absolutely yeah so is there anything

that you feel like we haven't really touched on yet that we probably should bring up um No, actually not. I mean, again, there's many things that could be improved in the Linux environment in general, like make it easier approachable to people. We talked about this already. But as for what I want to do with my initiative, I think we touched actually on everything. What I notice sometimes is that, and this is also something I'm not so sure about myself. Of course, I also like to use open source solutions if they're available.

and I am not that consequent in that way so far and sometimes I notice that I like you know there's certain people in the Linux movement who basically say we don't want more like closed source stuff on Linux so why are you doing this initiative because most of these plugin vendors are like closed source now so sometimes I and then I think half halfway of me think yeah but you know you're right actually

but then the other half also things. But it's also fun to try out all these things and to make Linux more attractive to all these people who are on Windows and Mac OS right now. So, yeah, I have some double speak in my head sometimes. I'm not sure if that's the right term to use, but there is like this side and that side. And sometimes I am easily a little bit intimidated

if I'm on the right track, you know. But then again, yeah, I think this is all something that develops. And I will also go further and further into the open source direction and maybe that's also, I ask all the vendors if they think that they could be open source.

And many of them think, yeah, maybe this could work and some of them are convinced that it would not work, but yeah, I think maybe even this could be influenced a little bit. No, I understand what you're saying there with there's always been this sort of mentality of

we want Linux to always be the thing that it's always been, right? Like, there's this tradition of open source and free software and I understand why some people are kind of standoffish about

anything encroaching on that space. It was kind of like this in many ways with, like, gaming, when it was first coming to Linux through Steam, where there was this idea of no tucks, no bucks, where Proton came along, but there was still these people who didn't want to support any developers,

unless they provided a Linux native version of a game. And that's kind of faded out over time, but there's still kind of the embers of that around the place. And you'll see people say, oh, I don't want the Adobe suite on Linux because I don't want Adobe software on Linux. And that's basically the extent of the argument. And I don't think they're necessarily wrong.

I just, I'm of the mindset that I would like more people to be using Linux and if those people are moving towards an open source direction where now the majority of their system is open source but they've got a couple of things here and there which just are not going to be whether that be games whether that be the door they use or the plug-in they use I think that's a better state to be in

I'm not the kind of person who says it has to be perfect or don't do it at all. I would like to move towards a positive direction. Yeah, absolutely. And again, like for me, I think probably it's normal for humans to just learn and never be 100% perfect. But for instance, I try to ride the bicycle as often as I can and not use the car. And still, there are people who tell me, you know, your bicycle is actually not that much better. It's the aluminum is also something that comes from an invasive industry and stuff.

And I agree, yeah, but still, I try to do something good. And also, if I want the world to change and not be dominated by mega corporations, then it makes sense to me to go into the direction of open source and use another operating system. So I think it's little steps. And I, again, with my positive view on everything, I think this all has an effect. And maybe one day we will live in this Star Trek kind of world where everything is just amazing and settled. Maybe not. But I think it's still worth to try to do the right thing.

And even if it means it's like only partially the right thing, right? So yeah. Yeah. And as long as we all have to earn money, I think there will be things that are not ideal because it's just, yeah, this world, right? But, yeah. Okay. Yeah. I think this is an interesting episode and I hope people got something of value out of it. I'm sure there's going to be at least a couple of, even if they're not Linux musicians who are fully dedicated to it, at least people who are interested in trying it out. And I don't know, hopefully people learn something. And if there is a plugin that you want to have supported, be sure to reach out to whatever company it is that makes it. that plug-in and yeah, maybe things can be brought to a better state.

Great. Thank you very much again for doing this show with me. I mean, I watch your videos all the time and it was really kind of amazing to hear your voice but actually realizing I'm not just listening. I'm actually in a dialogue. It's amazing. So thank you very much. Yeah, absolute pleasure. If people want to check out the initiative or check out anything else you do, where they, where can they find it? So just on Linux audio.def, basically. I think there's all the information there.

And I am active on Mastodon, so you can find me there also. And also the initiative is there. I post the updates there also. Yeah. And email. I'm very old school that way. Fair enough. Do you want to mention any of any, any,

personal stuff you do that's outside the initiative um well i mean if people are interested to learn more about me then they can also check out my website um amadeus paulosen dot com and i have a block there where like it's all like it's a little bit interwifed like the guides for instance are on my block because they are more geared towards musicians and um the initiative is more geared toward the developer's side. But yeah, if they're interested to dive deeper, then they can also check out my personal website. Okay.

Yeah, it was a pleasure to have you on. If you want to come and do another one in the future, hey, hopefully, hopefully some positive progress has been made. And, yeah. So nothing else to mention. That's pretty much it. That's it. Thanks again.

soon. Okay, I'll do my outro and then we'll sign off. So my main channel is Brodie Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. Sometimes I stream as well. The Cosmic stable releases coming up soon, so it'll definitely be a stream for that one. I've got the gaming channel, Brodyon Games. Right now I'm playing through Yakuza 6 and a Silk Song. And if you're watching the video version of this, you can find the audio version on basically every podcast platform at Tech Over T. And the video is on YouTube Tech Over T as well. I'll give you the final word. How do you want to sign us off?

Hmm. Linux all things. Perfect. Okey dokey.