Petition for Linux

Well then, it seems you have a plan. That's all anybody can ask for. Best of luck!

Hire an Electron/React freelancer from India for a week and he'll get
the job done. It's not a number of people problem, it's a mindset
problem.

Also an oversimplification. There is no magic pill. It's just not a thing. In fact, it might be exactly the opposite. "Farming it out" has been done in IT for decades and decades. Occasionally it works. Most of the time, however; SOMEBODY gets burned. Just look at all the issues with the MK3, which most certainly was not soldered together in the basement of the Native Instruments headquarters.

Haven't the customer had enough of a hard time in recent years?

Example: You farm it out to some "freelancer from India for a week" as you say. He's not going to get it done in a week. It's just not going to happen, because his work needs to go through all the same process as your regular team's work does.

Oversimplifying is really tempting, and for that reason, we just shouldn't do it. There are risks to everything you do or don't do. And if you don't have expertise and wisdom regarding the part of the world you might farm something out to, then you're just being gullible and asking for trouble.

Ignorance of cultures, norms, and customs will make you susceptible to being scammed, ripped off, and just being taken advantage of.

As I said, NI can choose to do something or not. One day, they might decide to go Linux. But right now, we've all experienced way too much trouble with NI software of late. There's just not enough resources to add another platform. And by that, I mean that there are not enough employees to provide support and fix bugs. And if you ask me, the customer base just does not have enough risk tolerance left for more failed launches.

It's astounding to me that people keep bringing this up. Your powers of observation are enough to tell you that market demand drives product, regardless of country, political orientation, or anything else. Why do you think China invested heavily in cultivating it's battery industry and electric car manufacturing starting a decade ago so they could be a dominant player in the world market based on upcoming DEMAND…not ideology.

Even at 3% that's hardly a demand referendum. What's drawing investment dollars these days is anything associated with AI. Even Apple jumped on that ship this last week. That's not about current demand, that's projection for future demand and they were very late jumping on board by comparison across the industry. No one is clamoring for a new operating system unless it has some relevance to AI…which has nothing to do with Linux.

I think the basic problem with AI, especially for investors, is I'm not sure they're all very clear on what AI consists of at this point. Because AI today only consists of Generative Intelligence, it really can't adapt and make decisions dynamically to make dramatic improvements based on changes in it's environment. So improvements can only come in the same way as it does with standard programs through "re-training" the AI. Sounds a lot like software updates to me….

yes, but you are pestering non Linux users with a petition that does not apply to 97% of the users here.

In addition to what Chris and Dragon say in their responses above, the Linux question DOES affect Windows and Mac users. A lot! Native Instruments has neither the staff, the money, nor the "banked up goodwill" to take on a 3rd OS platform, while still keeping up the pace on all the updates we HAVE been seeing in various products the last 3 to 4 months.

Adding Linux support requires a different level of expertise. I know. My past teams have supported Windows and Linux, and they're so different that you very rarely have a person able to support both platforms with equal expertise. 99.9% of my teams were Windows people OR Linux people with a couple of folks who could do some limited things in their "2nd language OS". But I sure didn't have any "master of all" team members. On top of that, there's MacOS expertise that people have to have.

And then there's that that lack of banked up goodwill thing. There's an army of people just on this forum who are super angry with NI for releasing the KK MK3 too soon. Some of those people are counting the months now! And then there are those who are even MORE angry that the fixes aren't coming fastly and furiously enough for their tastes. Some are even threatening to leave the NI ecosystem. The days are gone when humans were made for sticking it out through hard times.

Adding a third OS platform seems like a really bad way to get yourself overwhelmed to the point where you're being accused even more of giving "customer no service". But maybe a fast way to sink the whole ship, if that's what the true intent is.

I say let's get some wins under our belts for a few years. Like maybe 3 years of no Native Access "won't update" or "stuck on reloading" disasters, 3 years of no crazy crashing white-screen firmware update experiences in KK, and maybe 3 years of steady Maschine support too. We need to start winning before we start trying to build a whole new ship.

Adding to the petition. I don't even insist that it be native; there are decent tools these days for running VSTs in what amounts to an emulator/wine process, and while native would burn fewer cycles I'd settle for mostly-compatible with that. Heck, I'd even settle for running the plugin on a small Windows box with high-speed connection to Linux pipewire, if it was actually supported.

But Windows 11 is not going on my existing machines since MS refuses to support them, and I'd rather not have to consider discarding several thousand dollars worth of DAW modules when Win10 goes end-of-life. Running Windows without a patch stream is not tenable, and since I want an open development environment Mac isn't of much interest. It's gonna be Linux. The only question is how much of to upgrade money I've been giving NI will go to other vendors who want to outlive Microsoft's suicidal impulses.

@BIF expressed:

Thank you for the comment, but I wholeheartedly disagree with your logic that making it more complicated will actually result in efficiencies down the road. There's just no evidence that what you suggest would ever happen.

It‘s not my opinion but a simple fact many agile development teams have to face today. The evidence is found in countless companies all over the world.