Maybe multi-billionaire Elon Musk will donate a few billion to Linux soon to break the Windows monopoly...!

 

Well, Cubase was released in spring '89 and Windows was well established by then, not to mention Cakewalk was released in '87. At the time Steinberg had the predecessor to Cubase called Pro 16 & Pro 24 a little later on and Cakewalk was much easier to learn (hence the name) if as a musician you didn't know midi at all. MacOS was a thing too with great presence.
Anyway enough for the history. I dig Linux. It represents freedom. If Torvalds wanted he could easily have found the funds to make it a commercial product and i am very sure that it would have found its place in the industry and would have been much more supported and ready for all kinds of pcs. If Microsoft wouldn't kill it in the meanwhile like they did with so many other promising OS'es (remember BeOS). But even with its free nature, some things are just better in Linux. Especially raw performance of cpu and ram. In the beginning of Win11 it was funny, some games would run faster in Linux under Windows emulation than in their native Windows environment, with all that this implies. And this still exists. Windows -especially vanilla versions- just has a huge overhead which impacts any computer with a performance penalty from the get go, which is not the case with Linux.
Still, due to its free nature, most major music soft companies don't see profit for transporting their code to Linux, hence the pro audio battle is always Win vs Mac and Linux is almost never mentioned as an alternative to the two. Personally i will be waiting when comps become even faster and emu soft evolves and then i am sure we'll see more people using Linux for music.
Personally i 've tried Bitwig in a modern comp with Linux and was well satisfied. It does have limitations as a software platform but it is what it is. And what it really is, it's a step forward. More companies should join in. Waiting patiently.
Cheers all

 

Cakewalk was a sequencer first developed by Twelve Tone Systems, Inc. (the company later known as Cakewalk, Inc.).
Originally for DOS, starting with version Cakewalk 1.0 in 1987.

 

Linux works Linux' ways, Windows works Windows' ways, MacOS works Mac's ways. If you don't invest some time to learn these ways, you will not get accustomed to them, and probably not like that OS. I know all three very thoroughly and yes - Linux is the most different of them, but I love it. I liked using the console/terminal even in Windows. W95!

Nowadays I find Windows simply annoying and hard to work with. 8-10-11 in particular. Customisation... where is it? I mean, look at how I made my XP look. You can't do that since W7. Just one of the things I don't like about Windows. Screenshot from 2014. When I started using this Debian Linux I still use.

 

Last edited: Oct 16, 2025 at 10:37 PM

I have win10 looking and feeling pretty much like win7 thanks to classic shell & tweaking the OS to make it look/work that way. It's up to the end user to decide what they want to deal with. Same goes with all the junkware piled into 8-10-11. Those who are oblivious to the fact that it's there let it sit there - usually to pooch them later on down the road when a screwy update or some other wanker microsoft "feature" bones the entire system.