[ubuntu-studio-devel] DEs and how they relate to media production use

[Len Ovens]

On Wed, 28 May 2014, ttoine wrote:

> I do most of my multimedia production with Unity desktop and it is fine... I
> don't want to change anymore to another desktop, and I would be for just
> letting people choose what they want.
> After all, Ubuntu has Unity per default, why not use Unity for Ubuntu Studio
> ? Less time on DE customisation, and more time on building good tuning
> tools, be sure that application are working well, etc.

My post was not intended to start a "lets change the DE talk". I 
personally would not use unity for audio production without 
modification/tweaking. UbuntuStudio (and Ubuntu/linux in general) already 
gives us enough support headaches with getting Jackdbus to work for people 
even when it works fine. A person sees a daw (Ardour for example) and 
starts it... jackd gets started by that application and it is not stopped 
by that application. Now we have pulse-jack not able to work and have to 
teach the person to kill -9 the process from a terminal... that is just 
plain bad. It gets worse with Unity... hit the lens and type jack or 
control or what someone looking to start jack is going to type... worse 
type audio. None of the jack untilities shows up on the first page of 
applications. I have to go down three pages to find qjackctl and the only 
reason I would do so is because I _know_ I have to have it.

Gnome 3 is worse, searching for jack, qjack, control, audio, etc. Tells me 
no items found. Even typing qjackctl (no user would know to do that) gives 
no results. The only way I can find it is to either start a terminal (so much 
for GUI) or to select "show applications"... and search by hand through 
the whole shot because if I start typing qj already all the app have been 
filtered out. Typing qjackctl does not work either.

Ubuntu Gnome does have a "classic" session with a normal menu, but it is 
broken and non-standard having only one level of submenu which combines 
all the audio applications into a big mish-mash of unsorted 
applications... the very thing we worked to fix. It does not even 
"in-line" submenus as some menus do. It is made for the modern desktop 
with 10 to 20 applications spread over the normal range of app types first 
envisioned in the late 90s.

I think the new side app dock (standard unix/linux way of starting apps 
before win95 came BTW) could be a very good way of doing things if at 
least a part of it could be "switched in/out" depending on the task at 
hand. It would also be very nice if all of these docks uses the same 
method of configuration. A standard is needed.

I would envision the top icon on unity/G-shell would drop down a list of 
work flows and when a workflow was selected, the dock would show the 
applications as relevant to that work flow. new workflows would be 
downloadable.

Perhaps having jackdbus start with the session would make this simpler... 
The idea of having to start (another) sound server before doing audio work 
is foreign to most people, even those who have used Linux for years. 
Having jackd be a script that runs jack_control could work too. In any 
case audio production is not straight forward at all, and even worse with 
the new DEs. Those who know the binary name of all the appliactions they 
use can probably alt F2 their way through any DE... in which case they may 
as well use TWM or openbox directly.

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net