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by _delirium 5203 days ago
The semi-standard commercial solution for widget toolkits, excluding old software tied to something legacy, is typically to use Qt, which has both LGPL and (reasonably priced) commercial license options. Audio isn't really a problem for statically linked apps not doing anything particularly strange; it works fine in anything I've tried. Even ancient audio APIs in ancient binaries are transparently emulated through something-or-other in a way that "just works".

If you haven't used Linux in "many years", that might be the source of your impressions. I remember mucking with that kind of stuff on Slackware in 1998, but I haven't touched OSS or ALSA or whatever in a decade; it just does its thing under the hood. Audio even works fine when I run Windows applications under Wine!
1 comments
barrkel 5203 days ago
I use Linux every day; I haven't used desktop Linux much since a fairly unpleasant experience with the original Eee PC (701, in 2007).

But package management (I live with Debian apt-get and friends) is a bane of my life. Generally, the binaries that come when I install a package are too old, or don't have the right compile-time options configured, or there is some dependency missing that I don't have installed and is for some reason missing in the repository due to bitrot. It's usually more reliable to download the source, configure, build and install it the old-fashioned way. That also means fixing build errors, tracking down missing libraries, and generally a whole load of work I wouldn't trust an otherwise fairly competent software engineer to do, never mind the average user.

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icebraining 5203 days ago
What distro do you use? It's very much not my experience on Debian (Sid).
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luser001 5203 days ago
You use debian and are complaining about old binaries? I think they consider it a feature.

I use Ubuntu desktop/server and etc and my experiences with the package managers have been flawless.

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justincormack 5203 days ago
The Eee PC Linux install was terrible. I installed Ubuntu almost immediately.
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barrkel 5203 days ago
Yes; first I reenabled the underlying UI so that I had access to a console; soon after I installed Eeebuntu when it was put together by the community. I never used the original limited UI for more than perhaps 60 minutes total.
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