In the near-term, a better idea might be to establish an alternative under a co-op model, like Subvert is trying to do for music as a Bandcamp successor. Vendors are part-owners of the entity and have input into its governance. Any code should be open source, too. Federation would be great to later help turn it into a truly resilient global platform.

Great distro, I ran it on the daily too for a good while. It’s extremely well designed and if you are willing to give the benefit of the doubt with its design opinions, I think you’ll often come to agree with them (not all, but many)

Only thing I don’t like about it was the bugs and not having an in-place upgrade path stops me from calling it a “beginner friendly” distribution. I admire their ambition though, given they’re just a small boutique distro and they’ve done some great work for UX in the free desktop.

I am using Dynu. It works fine and it’s free, no complaints. Their app for Linux to update periodically didn’t seem to work well from my experience, I just set up a cron job to do it instead.

Fender Studio does seem like a nice alternative to something like Garageband.

I also switched away from Ableton on Windows a couple years ago. At this point, after working in several of them, I swear by Ardour.

It’s a little ugly, it’s a fair bit to wrap your head around at first, but it does serve every one of my needs. It even recently got a clip launcher much like Ableton’s “Live” view! The only thing I really miss from Ableton is its audio warping engine, but that’s long been one of Ableton’s killer features, even compared to Windows and Mac DAWs.

It kind of depends on your use case though; what are you using the DAW for? Demoing? DJing? Traditional tracking and mixing?

Also about people’s comments about Bitwig and Reaper - yes, they are indeed damned good. If you want a 1:1 parallel with Ableton and don’t mind spending a bit of money, Bitwig is about your best bet.

I think that’s q bit overblown. You have an option to use a Murena account in place of a Google account. I just said no thanks and everything works perfectly fine with no services affected. In terms of security of privacy of the Murena account itself, no idea. Never used one.

“Mum, if you really loved me, you’d be able to compile your own kernel”

Its users

I tried to use it for admin in a Windows environment, but half the modules I needed wouldn’t work in Linux which made it pretty much useless.

I have. It’s not very good. It attracts the wrong kind of people and because of that it would be very hard to stand up a healthy group on there.