It is not uncommon for the choice of application to determine both the hardware and the operating system. This has been the case since the beginning of IT.
I see it as a failing of the Unix manufacturers / community that they have not managed to develop a desktop system that is attractive enough for both users and software developers to compete with Windows and Apple.
In the past / beginnings of Unix the challenge used to be having to develop software for the 4 main hardware and operating system manufacturers: IBM, HP, Sun, DEC.
Surrounding conditions: the manufacturers used proprietary graphics accelerators and desktop interfaces / graphics libraries. The first standardization required was to settle on Motif to standardize both the GUI and the graphics libraries required by applications. Unfortunately, this also necessitated the rather high license costs for Motif.
The operating system, including the development system, also had to be standardized accordingly to have as few deviations as possible at the source code level.
As you can see, standardization was required to save all sorts of costs. It was just too expensive to have different systems for different applications. Development, support / training costs on the one hand and then costs for hardware, operating system, software licenses and training costs for the administration of different systems on customer side.
The current challenge, in my opinion, is that Linux does not cover all areas well. Here, too, support and development costs are simply too high and a certain lack of overall quality due to missing standardization caused by too many distributions/teams.
Ultimately, it is important for companies such as RME to be able to maintain the high-quality standards under Linux as well. And the expectations are pretty high.
Linux-support would certainly have been much easier to implement for many manufacturers, not only RME, if there had been a sensible form of standardization and a well-maintained, standardized overall system had been offered. But with the ridiculous number of over ~600 active Linux distributions, this is definitively not the case.
Instead of joining forces and working on a really better and competitive system, each team just wants to make their own, unaware that they are basically falling into the same pitfalls as others. But that doesn't create any quality or trust, only a certain chaos and imponderables. As an end user, you notice it best by how many Internet guides are outdated and how much the package management systems and maintainers of the packages are overwhelmed with reliably enabling the simplest things. Just changing the graphics driver to the proprietary nVidia driver is all too often a pain, and this is just one example.
A Unix system is only wonderful if the sum of the components is error-free and well coordinated. All the required applications that you are used to working with should also be available. The administration of two systems, Windows and Linux on one system does nothing but unnecessary work.
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