Petition for Linux

Juliettealison

No idea why it hangs. Starting with 'wine setup.exe' or something should give some info in the console and the WINE version should be not ancient. If you are installing from a mounted ISO, unpack it and copy to an accessible folder by wine inside drive_c. That worked for installing some Kontakt libs which refused to run the installer from inside the image.

Laurence Taylor

I should say to @Monochrome that all-bar-none of Native Instruments audio engines and user interfaces work in Linux with the compatability program WINE. There's perhaps one core component broken (Komplete Kontrol), and one optional (the Native Access ISO driver).

I'm not talking about 'developing software for Linux' in the way you suggest; the vast majority of things are already running happily thanks to the OS crowd.

leumas

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/14221#Comment_14221

Hi,

please, how did you manage to install native access? It is downloaded as .exe file and i have no idea how to install it. Any attempt fails, tried to downgrade wine and mount it, but it is always failure..

Laurence Taylor

You have to be more specific. What do you do, and what errors do you get?

PooFox

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/25425#Comment_25425

It's very easy but you can only use the old version of NA and mostly only for downloading files. Some things will install, but for most you have to use the instructions here: https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge

Very painful process to do individual installs with one of the Komplete collections, but hopefully only has to be done once.

Make sure you're using wine-staging and not plain wine. One other thing you can try is to make a fully working install on Windows and then carefully copy all the Native Instruments folders on your C: drive into the same exact folder structure within in your .wine folder (although your username folder may be different). I think you still need to run NA once to initialize the licenses, but this has worked for me before.

Btw NI, you really screwed us over on this new version of NA. Looks much nicer; works much worser. Even on Winblows. How about fixing some of the broken things instead of breaking things that work?

GoaSkin

macOS has a market share around 3.5%. That is also not very huge but most software companies support macOS.

Therefore, a company like NI should say to the mac OS users: "please install Windows"!

JesterMgee

Would make a lot of lives easier if they did :)

fsciarra62@gmail.com

Hi,

those general numbers aren't so significant...

Most of them, let's say the absobloodylootely majority of that huge market don't buy Komplete 13 Ultimate Collector Edition, isn't it? I did, and I'm a Linux user. And I only use Linux to make music and to work.

Now, I've just upgraded to Komplete 14 Standard and, up to now, I will not get any further because the problems I already had with Massive X and Battery 4 latest updates to 13, that is the preset aren't correctly installed because the .db file isn't updated, is now also on Kontakt 7 or maybe it's a similar one: in any case I do not find any of my library, and I have True Strike I & II and many many Chris Hein libraries.

Not talking about Native Access 2 which doesn't work at all, or iZotope which doesn't even install on Komplete 14. On Linux, clearly.

Now, given that I spend more and more and more money on Native Instruments stuff than, let's say, all the kids of elementary school or the nuns of the close church or... should I continue or it's clear that those big numbers are not all buyers? While in my little community many of us are Native customers? Where customers means that we buy, pay money, do updates, buy expansions, etc. Don't we count more that all the people on that counter, which don't spend a penny in Native Instruments software at all, now and never?

I think we Linux users, and paying customers, should be given more attention.

Best regards,

Fabrizio

GoaSkin

I have a multiboot-setup and in my case, Massive X neither shows it's presets under Linux, nor under macOS (totally empty in both cases) since the recent updates, while there is no problem in Battery.

Ronny Bangsund

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/30037#Comment_30037

More like 8.9%:

https://9to5mac.com/2022/04/11/mac-market-bucks-trend-with-continued-growth-while-pc-shipments-slow/

Another difference from the Linux demographic is that people get Macs TO do creative stuff. A significantly higher number of users would be doing music, art, video editing and more than Linux users.

It would be nice if a third OS for music and audio was taken more seriously, because Linux can be customised to be really focused on a task (see RT Linux and other efforts to get latencies down). But the lack of development there isn't as weird as the situation with games, even just having dedicated servers for Linux. After all, why run a Windows game server when you have Linux right there, without licensing hassle? ;)

suamor

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/21271#Comment_21271

On the contrary it is not only totally worth it it's also easily doable. You need one single person (developer) doing the porting work (if there is any). I think it is mainly packaging work and adding support for missing functionality in wine.

Saying desktop market has a share of 3% is not relevant here. You need to tell us number of potential customers that are using Linux. If they miss a number 10000 people interested in their products but not able to use it because they do not know how to install it with wine (i.e. support) than they loose a lot of potential money.

As the poster of this topic didn't actually setup a petition, we do not know how many readers of this discussion platform are interested.

Since a lot of companies going to subscription model (I personally hate this even though I would profit as developer) more people will try to move away from proprietary platforms. I observe since some time increased support of Linux on desktop from hardware manufacturers (laptop, desktops, audio hardware, graphics hardware).

The game situation has involved a lot in the last few months. I would be interested if people using NI on Linux would share experience with the Proton variant (Link: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton) of wine.

suamor

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/35150#Comment_35150

I guess you do not know much about audio and Linux. Linux has a very strong Audio community and only recently (due to Covid) has suspended first time since decade the yearly Linux Audio Conference. It's is made for composer, audio enthusiasts and developers. It not only features a lot of talks about recent developments but also has concerts with modern "music". You can find video recordings as well from the conference and partially from concerts as well. I participated myself very often with some friends. The conference is part of the linuxaudio (org) community. And you should definitively have a look at the ubuntu studio (variant of ubuntu) distribution.

DunedinDragon

What's always been amazing to me is how passionate Linux users are and how naive they are about commercial software development and what it takes to "productize" a commercial offering.

It's not about a single developer sitting down in a dark backroom and porting it over. The real costs come in the form of testing (all the various forms of testing such as unit testing, integration testing, performance testing, capacity testing, etc), product marketing and ongoing support. Instead of each update of functionality and product support having to be coordinated between the two supported platforms you now have three. Not to mention the problems of variations and releases of Linux updates and version changes. Those are not insignificant costs and require a fairly significant consumer base to make it at least break even.

The number that's significant is not the total number of Linux users, it's the total number of people within that group that would be interested in and financially capable of buying a fairly specialized product like those offered by NI. You can only determine that number through product market analysis...which is yet another sunk cost that may not be recovered.

GoaSkin

Software made for different operating systems usually isn't ported. It is planned from the beginning to run on different operating systems by using frameworks and libraries which are available for all operating systems you want to release your software. On the other hand, your own source is ideally written in a way that not even a single line of code needs to be customized to make it work on different operating systems. You call the similar functions of your frameworks while only the frameworks theirselves are internally different on each platform.

Nowadays, almost any framework is offered for all operating systems. Free ones as well as commercial ones. Therefore, it is almost the decision of the software companies if they not deploy their codes for Linux. But in the most cases, this is still possible.

A different case are games, which are "ported" in many cases. In this case, a loader is wrapped around the application made for a different platforms and the code is being modified to harmonize with the loader. Finally, the modified original application is embedded into a native application which translates all the API of a different operating system into native API calls. The user runs a kind of emulator with an embedded program. In some cases, WINE is also used for porting but there are also many commercial alternatives.

Finally, porting is more error-prone and requires a lot more work than planning your application platform-transparent. But ported versions are almost offered by different software companies. These are responsible to the end-users then and not the company who originally released software.

Regarding the software of NI, I would use native linux builds if they would be available. But if ported versions would be offered, I would continue to use the windows versions with WINE.

valnum

There seems to be a popular multiplatform audio framework called

https://juce.com/

JUCE.

However, deciding to use this framework is a sensitive move, because NI would have to rewrite most of its codebase (they are not listed as a company using it, while Serato is). Also, if JUCE choose to increase significantly the price of their licence NI would have no choice but to give them more money, which would jeopardize their own revenues.

Here are the main risks I see of switching to such a framework.

An alternative would be an NI joint-venture or spin-off to start developing new software (e.g. DJ mixing) based on JUCE with technology transfer from NI ; or NI to open-source some of their old-version software such as Traktor 2 (interesting in my case 🙂) making it available to the community to port it to Linux.