Because you might want to take a break and watch a youtube video your friend sent you, or listen to reference material while you work, etc? You can do that in Windows and OSX, and DAWs take a long time to start up due to the huge amount of memory they use so it's not convenient to close it and start it again for that simple task.

DSSI is an order of magnitude more difficult to write for than VST, and unportable, hence no one does and no one cares for complex plugins. In Windows/OSX world, it's very common to have apps that are 'VSTiszed', but this is also impossible with the DSSI model.

I've been following this for more than a decade, even wrote a lot of audio software for Linux, and all my music is made under it, with my own apps. Yet I recognize the situation will never improve. Here's why:

1) While the Linux kernel is perfectly capable of low latency, even on the shittiest of hardware, it does not provide the concept of primary and secondary buffers. If you want to use pro audio, you want to be able to mix the low latency, high sampling rate stream together with the regular OS/Desktop audio. Windows and OSX do this by setting the hardware for the realtime client, then also mixing the secondary audio over it, which comes from userland (or already mixed in userland). As a result, when using realtime audio in Linux, desktop audio dies or is hacked to route pulseaudio to jack and other stuff that does not really work well.

2) It's impossible to write plugins similar to VST, because of the different way tookits connect to X11 (they won't share the connection). You can't mix and match toolkits so a host DAW will use different plugns. The only way is to use separate processes, but that makes programming complexity much higher and very few people bothered. Wayland seemed like it could fix this in the future, but other distros such as Ubuntu refuse to use it, so it doesn't seem good.

3) Good programmers are not necesarily good composers. This is something that is much more important than it seems. Commercial companies are forced to listen to their users, but OSS developers mostly care about doing something good enough for themselves. Given the chance that a good programmer is a good producer/composer is super slim for the practical world, most audio software kind of sucks and feels incomplete. Ardour took more than a decade to implement MIDI and it still is horrible, because the main developers care more about live session recording. If they really had to use it everyday to make professional music, it wouldn't be as bare bones as it is now. At the same time, stuff that looks like a good idea (jack daemon) are terrible in practice because making music with a bunch of applications open is akin or worse to a live set of devices with cables connected.

4) Finally, the biggest problem of Linux is that, unlike other software such as 3D or imaging, there is plenty of cheap and good Windows/OSX audio alternatives, so even if OSS software were to run properly on Windows/Mac, the incentive is still slow. It's not like Blender or Gimp, that it's commercial counterparts are in the thousands $.

I'm not american, lived and visited several parts of the world. Love to talk and fit in with the locals and socialize.
Of course it's all anecdotal, but I'm pretty sure that something odd is going on in American culture. The times i've been there I couldn't help but finding amazing how such large parts of the population take behavioral related medication. I mean, even most TV commercials I saw were for anti depressants, or even complenents to them.

But it's not the medication itself what caught my attention but how people itself claims to be unwell, not feeling like what people should feel or not behaving as people should behave. It's as if there was some sort of strong "need to be normal" or "need to be well" (whathever tha means), and that not being like that is not fitting in society.

It's not that where I am from (South America) people won't get depressed or have panic attacks, but you see such symptoms by far much, much less often. It's not misdiagnose either or that people chooses to put up with it instead of taking medication , I mean, it's very clear when someone is going through depression. In contrast, people here are more "unpolite", intimate,cares less about rules and socialize a lot more. I'm sure there has to be a relationship somehow, but I am no expert on the matter. As I said, it's just what I see, but I can't connect the dots.

So, I think that even if pharmaceutical companies capitalize on this stuff, I'm not that sure they created the situation, I believe it's more akin to a side-effect.

Despite engineers from high traffic websites such as Facebook begging Mozilla to implement it in the hopes of saving bandwidth costs, and despite plenty of success stories for those who implemented it only for Chrome, they still continue do deny the format a chance..
Meanwhile, the internet still lacks a lossy compression image format that supports alpha transparency... Thank you Mozilla!

It seems like a giant project that was hurried, kind of like a Windows Vista. Isn't it getting gradually fixed?

Bikers are given more protections, such as exclusive lanes and crossing lights. However, a good amount of them decides to ignore them and have a higher chance to smash against a car or a bus.
So, the real question is probably, how safe is biking when you drive them safely?

At our company we use SCons to build our large projects, which span several platforms (mobile, desktop and consoles), and have plenty of autogenerated code, shaders, etc.
My point of view is that if you are going to need a complex, scripted build system, why not use a friendlier and more accessible programming language such as Python?

Why are you stating the obvious? Everyone knows that Wayland is a promising new technology that will revolutionize desktop graphics on Linux.
On the other hand.. I forgot what Gnome is, have a link url for that?

If using the DualShock 3 poses the problem of lack of touchscreen for some games, I'm sure Sony will allow using a PSVita as controller, so you can actually.. oh, wait..

First of all, before many here start mentioning Blender, Autodesk already has this kind of pay-per use business model with medium to large companies, where they provide software per seat, render farms and support.
Blender has been ready for mainstream usage for a long time now, and plenty of small studios around the world already use it for short films, game development, commercials and special effects. It's actually the lack of this kind of support and corporate presence what is avoiding it to get more adoption in larger companies.
So, this is not a chance for Blender, quite the contrary, Blender needs to do more like Autodesk.

At this point we are seeing evidence that both Republicans and Democrats have a limit to how much (or little) they can do or change.
Who is, then, in power of the United States if clearly not the legislative branch?

I can't believe I'm reading this. After almost 400 years, we're repeating history.

Occulus has success warranted, even if it by rare chance doesn't become a revolution on the way we play video games , it will be a revolution in the way we watch porn.

And all the Asian companies comply. If this isnt protectionism, I don't know what it is.