Hmm, looks like France and Germany are each smaller than Texas. Didn’t realize that.

And now I’ve got an old song stuck in my head.

“Glory, glory! What a hell of a way to die!”

Sustainably? They don’t (mostly). Most are either pet projects, paid for out of pocket by the instance owner or run off donations. Neither are particularly sustainable long term, with rare exceptions like sdf.org.

The SDF runs just about every federated service you can think of, and has done so since the 1980s, run almost entirely off donations. Started as a dialup BBS (still active).

I remember those! I had bought an Asus eeePC when they came out. Cheap laptops! Do you remember what yours was?

Not a new question. When I first got into Linux every one was asking “How can we get everyone to dump Windows and use Linux instead?” I long ago got tired of hearing about THIS year being the year of the Linux Desktop.

The answer is the same in both cases. Make it default, because most people don’t really care so long whatever is default does what they need it to do. Add in the network effect GitHub has and things would have to get incredibly bad before everyone would switch.

The reason everyone uses Windows? Because “everyone” uses Windows. Why does everyone use GitHub? Because “everyone” uses GitHub. Both have become the default. That would have to change.

Whoops, hit send without meaning to.

Since then I have been using Linux as a primary OS for most of the systems that I use on a daily basis. When ever I am using something else I constantly find my self missing the flexibility that Linux based OSs offer me.

And, yes, the hardware situation has gotten considerably better since then, as long as your not running bleeding edge hardware.

Back in 2003 my sister needed a computer of her own to do schoolwork on. We couldn’t afford a new computer and the only other system we had in the house other then the laptop I had just bought was still running Windows 98 on a failing hard drive and the Windows install disk we had was borked.

I replaced the hard drive, started looking for options and found Ubuntu. And it made sense to me. Once I wrapped my head around the idea of the console, everything made sense in a way that Windows and DOS before that didn’t. And I had the freedom to modify anything I didn’t like, a freedom you don’t really have in Windows or Mac OS.

And it was fast! This ancient computer (AMD Athlon, 256 MB Ram, Ubuntu) was running circles around my new laptop (Pentium 4, 1 GB Ram, Windows XP).

I wound up switching my laptop from XP to Ubuntu and ran smack into why some people complain about linux being hard to use. Some of my brand new hardware just didn’t work in linux. WiFi, no go ever (proprietary firmware), audio, ditto. I liked Ubuntu well enough that I decided to work around the nonfunctional hardware with usb WiFi and a audio expansion card until the next update to Ubuntu when the built in audio just started working.

Fair.

Some of your old proprietary plugins and hardware might work in Linux through a compatibility layer like WINE. Or it might work out of box, no software required. Or it might not work no matter what. It’ll be a bit of a crapshoot for each one.

I will say that JACK and Pipewire may make some of your hardware unnecessary, especially if your using it to get around Windows limited audio routing capabilities.

And of course MIDI stuff will generally work without issues. It’s MIDI.

I’ve never played with that Maschine mk3 so I couldn’t tell you how or it it will function.

Edit: autocorrect got me.

Almost all audio plugins you likely use do have native Linux equivalents (but not through the same developer). Check out Ubuntu Studio. Also I think highly of Reaper as a DAW. Reaper is not FOSS, but it is Linux native.

There is no substitute for a real doctor. You can get a second opinion from someone else. And should.

That said I think mayoclinic.org is fairly reliable source for information.

If it is something that can be remotely diagnosed, you might try Teledoc.com.

🤣😂

Yep! That’s us Linux users in a nutshell!

Sorry, couldn’t help…. This meme just popped in my mind!

http://www.quickmeme.com/img/c4/c4bef59cc926feccafd5c625a030ee194c620ca07dd9e96970dcab5193f7c12d.jpg