Heh I was about to post the exact opposite … now, it’s true that if you want to use certain DAWs and plugins, they’re not available on Linux … but with Ardour, Reaper or Bitwig you still have some very amazing DAWs at your disposal and there are many great plugins available.

Other than that I frequently perform as a laptop musician on stage (with my own software) and I wouldn’t want to use anything but Linux anymore. Pipewire + a class-compliant Interface, esp. on Arch (btw), seems to be the most rock-solid combination I know of …

Drivers on Windows seem to be so consumer-oriented that they try to do all kinds of stuff for you and I wouldn’t trust it at all in a live situation … everything seems to be way to fragile. MacOS is stable but I find the configurability is lacking behind.

When it comes to multichannel audio, I don’t think anything can beat Pipewire or JACK … free system-level anywhere-to-anywhere routing is so much better than the whole aggregate device + blackhole dance you have to do on MacOS … it’s super inconvenient if you ask me (and I’ve been developing multichannel audio software for a living for some time).

So, yeah … It all depends on your needs but for me, as someone who develops audio software both professionally and for their own music practice, and performs frequently, I’d say it’s the other way 'round … Linux, in 2026, blows everything out of the water audio-wise …

I guess I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, I wouldn’t by it again (or anything from the company), but at the time (just before the company went completely haywire) the A1 was the right machine (“just works” with decent print quality) at the right price (on sale + discount) that got me into 3D printing … so, I “fell” for the YT marketing for sure, but I don’t regret it one second … now that I know that it’s a both use- and joyful technology for me I would gladly pay for a Prusa but at the time I wouldn’t have … and I would have missed out for sure … learned 3D modeling, manufacturing, design, skills that I wouldn’t want to miss.

I guess after well over 1000h of printing I don’t have to expect it to go up in flames, either …

For completeness I should also say that I never updated the firmware and transfer data using the SD card exclusively, it’s not connected to any network … but that was my expectation to begin with, I didn’t know much about 3D printing before and I thought that’s how they work anyway.

Hmm not sure whether my cutter directly accepts SVG, I have to check … in fact I’m using Inkscape to assemble everything and then just use the application to generate gcode … not sure whether I can skip that step because the SVG doesn’t contain any info regarding cutting speed, laser power etc …

vapoursynth

Oh I’ve never heard about that one …

The problem with Davinci I encountered was that very common encodings like x264 or x265 don’t work with the community edition and I can’t justify getting the pro version from an economic standpoint …

Supposedly a solution for Blender exists but I tried to make it work and failed :( https://www.cadsketcher.com/

If you don’t mind using text-based interaction you could give OpenSCAD a try … it’s like TinkerCAD (solids and holes) but with code …

I might be biased here because I’m a programmer by trade but I didn’t find it too hard … also mostly need boxy shapes … but still, I think it’s neat …

My personal top 3:

Video Editing - Kdenlive isn’t bad in and by itself but it seems really slow to work with, and getting any kind of smooth preview seems impossible even with proxy clips … the other day I bought a GoPro 3D camera, and I can cut, preview, rotate, reframe and encode with their Android app on my potato phone from 2021, and it feels snappy (I was surprised, really). Yet on my i7 laptop with Kdenlive, much simpler tasks feel much more sluggish on average …

CAD - I use OpenSCAD for 3D modeling and I love it, but sometimes a GUI-Based CAD program would be nice. I’m sure FreeCAD is powerful but the UI/UX aspect makes it hard to unlock that power. I’m a bit conflicted about it because I really don’t want to play down the efforts of the FreeCAD dev team, and it seems like everyone and their mothers talk badly about their UI/UX. But on the other hand I tried a couple times and got really frustrated, and I’m usually not one to shy away from steeper learning curves. Supposedly you can do CAD in Blender but I never really figured that out.

Laser cutting - While most slicers for 3D printers work on Linux, Lasercutting seems a different story. You can still use older versions of Lightburn but it’s not FLOSS and it seems strange to pay for a license if the support for your OS has been discontinued 2 versions ago (or one, not sure right now). I want to give Rayforge (https://rayforge.org/) a try soon but until then it’s LaserGRBL or the program that came with my laser cutter on a virtual machine.

Honorable mention: A linux phone would be nice.

I doesn’t “need” to be imported, the question is just, where do we see the future of federated (non-)platforms ? Do we want them to be “small and cozy” with a small and fairly narrow selection of content or do we want a non-corporate alternative that can compete in richness and variety of interesting content of all niches?

A lot of folks only seem to see the crappy part of youtube and other platforms, and don’t see the richness of content that exists ther. There’s still so much interesting stuff to be found. I don’t think there has ever been a bigger archive of, say, documentation about arts, crafts, history, food, than YT, even it its current enshittified form. If that’s an ocean of content, the Fediverse isn’t even a major river (at least that’s my impression).

If you don’t mind that, great. But I do, I’d love a non-corporate version to exist that can compete in terms of richness of content.

And monetary incentive is part of the puzzle, as it incentivizes people to spend time on it, which in terms generates a bigger audience, which in turn has a higher potential to support a wider range of content niches. Plain and simple.

I don’t agree, really … that’d limit the Fediverse to hobbyists.

It’s completely legitimate to look for income & exposure as a creator, whether you’re making music, visual art, or document your process making physical objects. Corporate platforms, as crappy as they might be, provide a path to that, and in many ways created viable path for creators to do what they like full-time. Not saying that it’s perfect or easy. But the Fediverse is currently no alternative at all …

Currently, restricting yourself to the Fediverse as an artist unfortunately means that you’re taking quite a hit in terms of exposure you can get. As long as that’s the case, and people even defend it, then we really can’t complain that the Fediverse isn’t attractive for a larger amount of people, and centralized platforms will always have the bigger draw.

I try to avoid corporate platforms as much as I can, but as a consumer I often feel starved of content. I haven’t found any interesting woodworking channels on PeerTube, or guitar repair channels, or whatever else I enjoy watching to wind down.

And as a creator, well … it’s not my source of income, but I sure would like it to be. And if I ever decide to make that step, I’m pretty sure that I’s have to make amends to my “no corporate platforms” approach. The Fediverse doesn’t feed you.

As some people have pointed out, it protects the liver, but from personal experience, I can’t confirm the “not getting drunk” part … so I’d be really cautious about blanket statements as the one in the title of this post.