I much prefer Inkscape over Illustrator for my vector art. I much prefer Audacity over... actually I'm not sure what's considered the direct commercial competitor here for post-processing audio. I mildly prefer Photoshop over Gimp for graphics design and tablet drawing, but after almost a decade of using each, they're practically interchangeable for me. I mildly prefer Blender over 3DS Max for making game models (though I admit it has been a while for me—I hear the recent Blender releases have amazing improvements). And that's not even taking into account the difference in license costs.
I'm not claiming to be an expert in any of these industries, but I don't think I'm completely naive here either. I can imagine there is a strong majority of experts who would never considere free/open source alternatives to things they've been using since they graduated their respective art school and paid thousands of dollars in licensing fees. I feel they're missing out, even though I'm biased towards open source.
actually I'm not sure what's considered the direct commercial competitor here for post-processing audio.
Audio is an interesting market. Sound Forge comes to mind, but based on the time I've spent in studios, I'm going to speculate that professional audio is either done with hardware, or really old software.
The particular example I'm thinking of was a MacOS9 computer (in 2009 or so). The tech told me two things kept him back; he had all the plugins he needed for the software he used (and that many were not available in newer suites), and something about realtime recording.
Most commercial studios would be running either Pro Tools, Cubase/Nuendo or Logic. There is nothing in the open-source world that comes even remotely close to rivaling any of these packages at the moment.
MIDI: those Atari apps you're thinking of didn't do audio.
General utility: perhaps you need to talk to various people who do, in fact, use Ardour instead of ProTools. As for the comparison with Reaper - Reaper is a very impressive project, but if you try it for pro- usage rather than home-style recording, you will very rapidly discover quite a lot of basic issues that they have not addressed, but were being done correctly by Ardour 8 years ago. I look to Reaper for good ideas and impressive development speed, but they really are focused on the needs of a different type of market segment than I really pay the most attention to.
It is true that there is no single DAW that is to everyone's taste, and Ardour is probably a more "acquired" taste than many others. At this time, I would say that more or less no DAW can easily "replace" any of the others. You can't really replace ProTools with Nuendo either.
jsprinkles: we distribute binary copies of Ardour from ardour.org that run on any Linux distribution (just about - we discovered a wrinkle that interferes with this on a few platforms, and the next release(s) will correct this).
Ardour is a cool project but again, it's not remotely close to Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase, or even REAPER. It's like comparing a military aircraft carrier with a canoe, sure they both float on water but they're not even in the same league.
I've kept up with Ardour progress over the past 6 years and it has consistently gone nowhere while the major players innovate continuously. The assertion that Ardour has a chance at competing with the professional packages is absurd given that they've been promising basic MIDI support for years now, a feature that was present in software packages on the Atari. Add to that the fact that the project doesn't even have a roadmap for future development and it all looks pretty grim.
My previous career was audio engineering, and I can't help but laugh when the FOSS crowd insist that Ardour and Audacity are capable of replacing the industry leading software packages.
Having used both, Ardour has a long way to go before it's remotely close to Pro Tools, even SE.
I think you might see interest in the platform develop if there weren't dozens of distributions to worry about. The distributions hamper Linux development, because you have dozens of different variants to try on, all with different versions of things and different bugs. As another commenter said, I bet you could get something Pro Tools quality if there was a consistent Linux-based desktop, not four or five frontrunners all doing GNOME differently.
Sadly, some people refuse to work if they aren't using photoshop/illustrator/autocad/etc. But yeah, I'm with you, I use gimp and inkscape but I'm no professional.
A perfect example are front-end developers. It can be tough for anyone to make a living in that line of work without being able to edit/open photoshop and illustrated without having to configure wine.
I truly believe Adobe holding back their products is one of the largest roadblocks linux has to get widespread adoption amongst the design/developer community.
I'd be surprised if Adobe isn't at least looking into this, especially considering their sometimes sour relationship without Apple.
A lot of the more "arty" people I know would consider giving them a Windows computer to use as a personal insult and would probably be more open to switching to Linux than Windows.
Getting arty people to use desktop Linux could be a huge net positive if they decide to help "pretty" the place up a bit.
It's certainly nice when UI/UX people run GNU/Linux distributions. Daniel Foré is in charge of Elementary OS [1]. Because he's a designer, the project already has a proper set of Human Interface Guidelines [2], a set of uniquely designed (and easy to use) core applications [3], and a beautifully coherent look to the entire OS and website.
Exactly this, I'm a designer, and I like the look of ubuntu, but it's no macOS, it's hard to see an advantage that linux has over macs apart from the price - but designers need fast (expensive) machines anyway. No Adobe is the reason I can't even contemplate a switch.
I love blender though, my 3D tool of choice so at least 3D artists are well catered for.
Professionals have spent considerable time learning their tools (PS, Illustrator...), hence while these tools are not available on Linux they will always refrain from shifting to Linux and that is quite understandable. After all every need their work done best possible way with least obstructions.
