Yeah, I agree. It's just as a composer I am not too interested in sound synthesis, I am interested in using it =) I guess with time it will change.

Funnily enough, I've shown this discussion to my friend and he, having ready my post, said - Did you see the Bristol project? I said what? And he gave me a link: http://bristol.sourceforge.net/index.html I've installed it now and now trying out. Great GUIs, beautiful sounds. I may have to take the above soft synth rants back.

I have moved to GNU/Linux two and a half months ago. I wanted to move before but as a musician I did not want to give up music and what I saw on GNU systems was very weak and simply did not allow me to do anything. I have to point out that I am not an orchestra man, I am an electronic musician. So I don't care for much recording (although I do for some), I care more for effects, synthesizers and sequencers. What can I say? Apart from a long learning curve (which is okay, actually, I don't mind learning something if I know it will get me somewhere) the biggest problem are the plugins. the sequencers and all that general stuff is more or less usable, Ardour is cool as a multitrack editor and recorder, LMMS is already in a pretty good state as an intergrated DAW. Apps for live performance are basically killer apps. JACK itself, ardour, kluppe, sooperlooper, being able to route that stuff, JACK Rack - all of that is great. But... But the lack of good plugins and software synthesizers is a blocker for studio work. In electronic music sound manipulation is the core of what you are doing. On PC and on Mac you have VST and AU plugins, and loads of them - effects and synthesizers alike. There are literally hundreds of high quality stuff. On GNU/Linux, unfortunately, there are only LADSPA effects, which have ugly GUIs and most importantly are mostly very basic effects, in many cases buggy and not so well sounding. There is literally not one really good reverb. There are a couple of good reverbs for voice, but they are very specific. Apart from CALF pack, most of the LADSPA plugins are almost useless. They either don't work or offer you twenty parameters which you have to tweak to get some basic delay. Absolutely no presets makes it difficult for non-engineers to get some simple stuff done. But the effects, while very important, is not the biggest problem. After all, I can eventually create my own presets and there are also LV2 which have potential (although I found no way to actually check any of those as I simply do not know how to install them and how to plug them in), but there are almost NO SOFTWARE SYNTHESIZERS. Apart from a ZynAddSubFx, which from a point of view of a Linux user is a genius product, while to a Windows user is just a normal VSTi plugin you would find dozens of in the VST world. Yeah, it may be closer to stuff like Sytrus, since it is potentially a great synthesizer and you can do lots of cool synth work, but honestly - I've seen many-many synths like that and the fact the GNU system has just one is really a good way to highlight the problem. Eventually, having observed that the switch to GNU/Linux basically stopped my music production, I decided to install FL Studio, a proprietary app, through WINE and have to use it for its plugins. As soon as LV2 plugins become better and there will be much more of them, I would say that GNU/Linux has finished its transition to being a good OS for audio work.