Come on Native Instruments! Think Linux!

Fair enough. You still have the market share issue to contend with. How large is the Linux user base for music applications and does it justify the resources to support them. It's the exact same dilemma that a company like Adobe would face with their Photoshop and Illustrator products and whether they need to bother supporting Linux or whether they need to spend their resources there vs competing head on with other players in those markets. Personally, I would much rather NI spend resources into developing products to compete with Steinberg and Akai than supporting a Linux platform.

BTW. just an fyi.. UNIX is not Linux. UNIX is FreeBSD, Solaris, e.t.c. .... Linux is Ubuntu, CentOS, e.t.c.. ;-) The Mac OS is a little closer to a UNIX though its been bastardized and its guts stripped out.

So you reverse engineered a NI software product without their okay? it's probably a good idea to notify them and ask for permission to release it as a 3rd party unsupported tool and see where it goes. I have a JDXI and use the JDXI manager editor which I am fully aware is a unsupported 3rd party tool not made by Roland and accept any issue if may or may not cause on my system and synth.

 

Yeah this is against NI's EULA...

 

Hi, long time Linux user here and owner of NI Stuff.

I just felt it worth to point out a lot of false facts being presented by a few posts. Though I will note to their credit they were correct at some point in time.

First of all i wish to address the EvilDragon
"Audio production on Linux doesn't seem to be the future any time soon. Or ever. A few products supporting it doesn't mean everybody should, or will."
- not really entirely true. Distrobutions like Ubuntu Studio were spun for the soul purpose of multimedia production, it includes a lot of underlying differences from the baseline desktop Distros such as:

• Realtime Kernel
• Realtime audio tweaks and JACKD is installed out of the box (Pulse audio also has tweaks for lowere lacency, comparable to coreaudio on MAC)
• lots of free tools to edit sound, audio, compose, mix, sample etc.

A Distro like this would be a prime candidate for Traktor. (IL did also look in to linux support so there's that.)

---
Simchris
"Also, generally, the majority of linux users do not want to pay for commercial products, wanting it all to be open source."

Please don't speak for "the majority" of linux users and add 'do not want to pay' in the same sentence. this is a stereotype against people who use linux, an assumption at best that they only want free stuff. the truth, in fact could not be further from it and has systematically been proven false over the last few years alone. (Just look at the exponentially expanding linux gaming community, also professional server markets and medial/scientific research fields)

--- My penny here ---
The market share issue is the same old chicken and egg argument. I know i'm not the first to bounce off of Valve as a somewhat semi-unrelated example, but fact of the matter is, they are the first company to slap down huge investment in to the Linux space and since that day the OS has seen huge growth and attention from large companies like nVidia, AMD, AAA publishers and so on. the market as a result has grown exponentially, and continues to do so as the improvements pile on. - it proves that with the right investment and the right time, things change for the better.

I'd like to swing that point around to this topic, and say the same can happen for the Multimedia production space.
there's a rather large and commercial product out there in the Videography space called Davinchi Resolve. Guess what, their core hardware stuff runs on CentOS. Their desktop video editor is available cross platform, and people pay for it. - I have no doubt in my mind that if companies like NI etc. actually ditched the outdated rhetoric that seems to linger around linux like a bad smell in a closed room, progress can be made and the market can expand.

Things worthy of note.
As a DJ for the last 10 or so years, I started out using a cheap-ish laptop with windows on it. Traktor when I adopted it was my new go-to program for doing what i enjoy. It wasn't until of course I had one of window's infamous 'program not responding' bs errors mid set (Traktor was still working fine in the background, but this popup insisted it must be closed) and a few blue screens here and there... that I realised I needed something more reliable. Sadly, Linux wasn't an option, so instead I had to pay out heftily for a macbook pro, and I've been using one for half the time I've been doing this shtick now.

now we're rolling through 2019, lets face it, I'm not interested in the new mac lineup, Apple have gone in a weird anti-consumer direction and I am by no means a fan, I want out. But i do not want to move back to Windows, especially since that landing is going to be Windows 10 when 7 becomes entirely unsupported.

As I mentioned, I'm a long-time linux user (Since 2005) so i'm more than familiar with its inner workings, i've watched it grow so much over the years, and yes, it is my default OS, even for Gaming. (I'm really enjoying Elder Scrolls Online right now, a game until mid-last year i couldn't play on Linux, but now I can thanks Valve. ) - I would very much like to be able to continue using Traktor on my preferred desktop OS of choice, it has the robustness and security of macOS but doesn't tie me to buying specific, over-priced and frankly wtf-apple-wheres-the-io? devices

Much like the computer industry moved on from the commodores and Amegas during the 90's (Because PCs became capable of doing musics!) it's entirely possible that we're in for a desktop OS shift from Microsoft to 'other options' as well.

 

But, if I cannot have ALL the tools I've paid for on my current platform, and having an established workflow with all of them, there's no point in moving to another platform that doesn't support all those same tools (or you can sorta get them running through WINE at a performance penalty, which is again, not really very cool). And I would think many other feel exactly the same about this.

 

I wasn't discounting that, our point is we want those tools to become available nativly, thus the slew of people constantly asking for it to happen.
Such requests get shot down too often with the same, ageing argument of market share, and my point above was to prove that investment to create that market can surprise companies with a decent return.

-on a side note, I too run some adobe products in wine, older ones now but still. Wine is improving at a rate of knots, the performance impact you mention is one of the core focuses of improvement that has seen a lot of work, at most the overhead penalty is about 1-2% as far as games go.

 

It's pretty much always going to be valid, though. If your userbase is 99% Win/Mac, why should you focus on the remaining 1%, when it likely wouldn't result in the same amount of revenue that comes from the major contingency? Makes no sense. Especially considering NI already had considerable venture capital investment that was spent on certain acquisitions, those investors are looking for huge returns ASAP. Linux userbase is quite unlikely to provide that. Using Steam as an example might be valid in some points but not that valid in some others. Comparing the size of gaming industry with the audio production industry, it is MANY times larger and as such it doesn't provide the same economies of scale, you cannot expect the same returns from our (by comparison) cottage industry, hence doing such a huge investment in Linux that Gaben did is a tremendous gamble. And I'm not convinced NI would like to gamble one more time.

 

It's as I said a chicken and egg situation. I don't personally know (and by know I mean actually in contact, converse with and consider a friend) Another Producer (Indie or otherwise) Or DJ who aren't in the same boat as me and agree that we would likely switch if the software became available on Linux but alas for now are stuck where we are because it is at present, not.

I would bet money that the percentage of people out there who don't use Linux but "Want to" or are otherwise silently interested in an alternative. Is far greater than the current active user base percentage.

 

FWIW, I work in IT professionally. The Linux on the desktop alternative to push and promote the FOSS agenda died years ago. That battle got lost to Apple. Eric Raymonds world was a world much like Lord of the Rings in movies, a world without the likes of Amazon and Google slowly pulling everyone away from non-standardized uncontrolled desktops and configurations into their standardized controlled cloud services ecosystems.

But back to music and technology. The main issues are you want to get work done, you don't want to waste time promoting FOSS. If I have decided to allocate 120 minutes to making music I want to spend as much of that 120 minute working on that music project. I don't want to spend 60 minutes of it debugging a dependency or why something isn't working. I don't care if I have give $100 to Microsoft of Apple for their proprietary OS. I already spend over $1000 on the commercial software thats running on the system anyways. So what do I care if $100 went to a different corporation. for that $100 I wasn't sssuarance that whatever hardware I have in my studio is supported and works with their product.

 

I work Professionally in the IT Industry too, It's a mixed bag of systems here so i'm pretty adapt at working on all 3 major systems were they're suited best, so I Agree, right tool for the job.

if i may stick to the tool analogy though. What we're basically faced with is "you buy a Spanner/Wrench. You may use it at work, but by some mythical force of market control, you can never really take it home to fix something there, you want to but you find you never have the will power to pick it up and take it to your comfort zone. you're forced to go home and use something that sorta works like the same tool, but it's made of rubber or doesn't quite fit." What we're asking is that tool be 'permitted' for use elsewhere.

As for dependency issues.... for a while now, there's been a system called the .appimage for Linux, they work identically to MAC OS's .app bundles. they are literally self contained applications in bundled packages that negate the nonsense of occasionally busted dependencies and so on, and unifiy the software deployment. (Etcher is one such app that uses this.) so yes, I hear you, that's an annoyance, but also one that's been addressed and is waiting to see wide-spread adoption. (All current major desktop OS players support this like Ubuntu) again though, I don't know your experience with Linux, mileage varies? Ubuntu and it's derivatives have come a long way the last couple years.

 

Without letting this get into a big discussion about for or against FOSS & Linux on the desktop argument. Think of it as a business owner. Lets say you decide to get into the soft synth market and compete with U-he and NI with your own contribution. You have limited resources and you make your soft synth product and release it. You need to keep updating and patching the product itself to keep with with changes in marketplace. You also need to make sure your product works and is compatible. Your choices are, you support the two main major vendors -- Apple and Microsoft -- and that's that -- and you devote the rest of your resources to adding the features everyone is asking for. Or you support every flavor of Linux and system config combination out there and devote less resources to adding the features that everyone is asking for. Its like the old engineering paradigm. You can make it fast, reliable or cheap -- you can only pick two. You can't have all three.

As I said earlier, I already made a significant investment in my studio setup in the form of instruments and commercial software. I really don't care at this point where I save $100 of a OS license. if I made a commitment to person X that I will spend 2 hours working on their song project. The important things to me are that I can open up and import all the things that person sent me with the minimal about of time invested. To be able to work on their project with whatever crap I happen to have in my studio that I know how to use. To be able to package it up and send it back to them and them be able to open it up without having to hit a tech support forum .Those are the important things to me when it comes to music. For the money I give to vendors like NI or whoever elses products I use, I expect them to devote resources to being able to support all the hardware and software I have in my setup and not have to spent to much time on forums bugging them about why it doesn't work. Which I have to say is a true statement. Any and all issues I have had with NI have been mostly because I didn't read the manual -- not because it doens't work with things in my studio.

There are and have been FOSS Linux based software for music. There are vendors that do make Linux alternatives. Go with them if Linux is your preferred setup for making music. But don't ask all the other vendors to shift resources to supporting your setup and take away from adding new features.

 

... all the users of Maschine, Traktor, Reaktor, Guitar Rig, Kontakt, Massive etc. etc. are really happy about how these products are maintained & updated. So considering NI's track record - sure, adding support for an OS with a supposably big market share seems like a really good idea.

 

A lot of indie developers (Including myself) Would disagree strongly with this. C++, C# etc. Code I write on Windows, can be compiled and run on Linux or Mac. - Traktor 3 seems to use QT from what i've seen (I'd need to dig deeper to confirm for sure, though the NI Access definitely does), a graphical library that's cross platform. it's not difficult to add platform conditional compiler instructions (Which would already exist for the mac/windows interchangeability) to account for the minor variances on each platform, that is assuming all the back-end processing is not already being done using a common engine paradigm. (which actually further simplifies development)

 

My brain doesn't work that way. I am not a developer. I am an Infrastructure guy. My job is to keep putting the brakes on you and piss you off.

 

Evil Dragon already made most of my points on the topic, but simple fact is less than 2% of all desktop users run Linux, so hard to make a business use case for NI to make full commercial versions of their flagship products for tiny commercial user base at this time. It would be more viable to make IOS versions, probably if anything. And anybody asking for virtual instrument support in this forum is certainly not in the majority of Linux users. I use Linux, Windows, MacOS, iOS daily. I started using Linux in 1996, and my first PC was a Tandy and I wrote the first magazine review of a hardware software MIDI interface in 1984 in POLYPHONY magazine... so I am more than a little knowledgeable on the state of tech, working and innovating in the field every day. So, sure, Linux would be nice, but why wish for that when you could be making music right now on mature platforms with mature software, at reasonable price, with enough of a paying userbase that the can rely on support the next 5 years at least. linux would be nothing more than an experiment or pet project if it di happen. So, that is my long winded reply to the topic that comes up again and again with same arguments. I am sure NI has gotten requests, but not enough to make a business case for effort required. Cheers.

 

That magical 2% unicorn can be debated to no end, the number changes depending on where you go. Some places say 3.37, some say 1.9 some say 2. and almost all of it is based on browser agent strings (which can be spoofed)

NI actually make the vast portion of their revenue from hardware, the software (Which they bundle in as a freebie, I already looked in to this before purchasing the S4 MK3) is their smallest margin. worth noting that they in fact develop linux drivers for some of their devices.

 

Are you really sure about that? Biggest seller for NI is not a hardware product at all. Profit margins they have on hardware are not nearly as high as profit margins from software, etc.

 

One hardware purchase - £700~
Software Purchase - £44 for upgrade - £89 for full purchase

Software cost bundled with hardware - NIL. (Evidenced above)

Number of times 44 goes in to 700. - 15.9 (Lets say 16)
Number of times 89 goes in to 700. - 7.8 (Lets say 8)
- Do not tell me that the Mk3 cost them £700 to manufacture, if you think that then you fail to grasp even the basic concepts of manufacturing and retail. Even if they only sold it at a 50% markup (Very unlikely) that'd still be 8/or/4 times the income sales per head.

Given that most of their software output is freebies with exception to the few flagship applications like Traktor Pro, etc. the sales price is still at the bottom end of their catalogue.

Lets not forget that you get free updates for the lifetime of that release, and a huge discount on the version upgrade. - So show me your data.

 

Okay. fine. So you say you are a developer and Linux support expert?

So, lets say I give you a job in a company that has 200 people who work on a product targeted for Windows and Mac OS X. But because the Linux user base is 2 to 3 %, we hire just one person, you! to support and vet all the issues and problems the Linux user base might run into with the products. All flavors and all variants -- its on all you, because the user base i so small.

And one more thing, if we get more than 100 users complaints in the ticket system from the Linux users, you get fired after 12 months for incompetence.

FWIW, I worked on everything from Debian to RHEL/CentOS to OmniOS, even old Solaris and IRIX -- but they are all servers running server apps. Not desktops for business programs. I use Windows for manage them. As I told you, the battle for desktops got lost long time ago. Now that all the business app $hit is moving to cloud, Linux on the desktop is even more fauked because now you have to contend with all the major apps like word processors and email and calendaring being hosted on a cloud platform that is heavily integrated with the browsers on the desktops and mobile phones. What people care about is that their calendar on their phone and their desktop is in sync and they want one interface to mange and share data. The battle is being fought between the major players Google and Microsoft. The Gnome project hasn't got a hope in hell of competing in that commercial market space anymore. It was a fun dream while it lasted. 10 years ago SUSE had the greatest change but they sort of fucked up because they had C level exec who had no idea what FOSS really was. If Apache bought SUSE instead of Novell , who nowws what would have happened. And RH was always too focused on selling enterprise services. ;-)

 

I think you're failing to grasp just how successful Komplete bundle is.

I cannot divulge any numbers, but I've seen them, as opposed to your guesstimates.

So you have accurate info on how many HW vs SW units NI sold and how many freebie vs payware installs there are out in the wild? Yeah I don't think so.

 

Your data is somewhat selective. There is a huge range of hardware and software base costs across 3 divisions in NI, and I'd bet the DJ division is the least profitable. Komplete software generally retails for more, and outsells Komplete hardware, without the significant manufacturing, distribution, retail, inventory overheads.