Operating System for Professionals

[Wayne Morellini]

You are one massively misinformed individual.
You're right. I need my head examined for trying to respond to your rants...

I forgive you Jake. But you are massively delusional, and practicing foolery against an innocent. Rather than admiting wrong you have basically tried to twist things in your micro rants, rather then reason. The definition of Open Source is a classic one. If you can't respect somebody expressing reason of truth, or the truth, it is useless. Remember, I'm the only one that apologised, even though I said "I think" (as good as "might") and "might" and "unsure", and did not say it was definite. The other subjects I was 100% right in, but you avoided addressing them.

So welcome to my ignore list, only three people on it in 9 years, when there should be at least 20 that hound people trying to be reasonable to make themselves feel alright. Congratulations on trying to score points which ever way due to a lack of love.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Now, let's leave these people back to their Mac os discussion.

If anybody has anything to say worth saying, people can quote it.

 

[Blair Thornton]

Full disclosure: I have not used Mac OS Sierra. But from what I can see in the preview, this seems to expand the OS to do more things for you, to be more involved. It wants to be your personal assistant. I think for some people this may be a welcome evolution. For me, I want the OS to get out of the way, to serve the tools I use in an invisible manner. I want it to be stable, reliable. If I need to get under the hood, that option is there. I understand there is a large segment of the population that Apple and Microsoft are trying to appeal to. I understand that we are in an ios era with smart phones and tablets dominating the market. But where does that leave the professionals that need something else? Will we simply have to adapt to the whims of A & M? Linux and other OS are intriguing but not all of the tools I use are compatible.

For those who know this stuff at a deeper level, i.e. Jeff, Eric, etc where do you stand on this? Do you feel it's heading in a good direction for the slice of the user base that doesn't feel the need for Siri on the Mac desktop or lots of things trying to run in the background? Does anyone else desire a clean, streamlined OS or am I just becoming the old guy resistant to change?

No, I totally agree and want a stripped down OSX. Notifications are a frigging pain, so there's no way I want Siri. You can easily customize OSX though, using Tinkertool https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html

 

[Steve Sherrick]

It's interesting to read that because it's not only a seemingly old hat attitude towards an OS you also seem to be pinning for what ultimately is Mac OS. Siri isn't there to get in the way, much like an actual personal assistant Siri is there to be on call when needed. The reality is multitasking has gotten to the point where it probably wouldn't make a difference to the performance of the operating system if you switched her off or not. It kind of reminds me of a tutor I had back in the day who didn't like exposé because he insisted it was closing programs or whatever but it wasn't it was just shifting windows out of the way temporarily. Not to mention Mac OS is also UNIX and you have terminal access though I'm not entirely sure if that's what you mean by getting under the hood. I haven't properly used windows since 7 though I didn't really use that properly either so maybe XP was the last time I properly used Windows but based on what I've seen Mac OS is still more dependable then Windows.

Siri may have been a bad example, but I'm pretty sure there is a lot going on in the background that I would rather not have going on. Some of it I can turn off, some of it I'm not sure that I can. And this extends beyond just the OS as well, it's the apps themselves. For an example, with Avid their Application Manager auto launches when the computer boots up. It then tries to connect to the web. If it doesn't find a connection it just kind of hangs and continues trying to connect. No big deal, I'll just tell it to not auto launch. Well, not so easy. Tried some of the common ways to kill it, including some command line tasks. Couldn't kill it. Contacted Avid about it. They basically admitted that there was no way to stop it from auto launching on the Mac and they were working on it. It's stuff like this that kind of drives me crazy and why I'm a bit frustrated about the tentacles into the system. I'm happy to license software. But I pay a bit of a penalty for everyone who isn't so honest.

Back to the OS, I want to be clear that there have been some positive advancements over the years too. I'm not completely dumping on A & M. I just think there are two agendas that are in a bit of conflict with each other. Consumer and professional. Consumers want all of the cool features that integrate their iPhones, tablets, with pop ups, notifications, etc. and professionals want an OS that is invisible and gets out of the way so you can get work done in an optimized way, utilizing only the resources necessary to get that work done.

I'm also completely okay with being proven wrong on this. These are just my general observations. Those observations could be skewed, inaccurate, flat out wrong. There are others who have far greater understanding of how operating systems work, what's truly going on under the hood. I'm open to learning more about this topic.

 

[Antony Newman]

G A &M : I am not a fan of bloat, or masses of programs I don't want to start up during Boot; But can see the some benefits where a sharing anonymised application data can be useful like :

+) When a program crashes -> some sort of crash log that can help a developer understand the root cause especially if they are not able to reproduce the issue.
If privacy can be protected, I would want to be able share this with the Application creator.

+) When a program has an issue, does not crash, but recovers and has diagnostics -> I would also want these to be used to help fix the Application.

+) Understanding the most heavily used areas of and App, and areas which cause user frustration -> I would want to share.

The issue with many Capture Tools that I have seen, is that they seem to use system resources. With multicore computers (say 6 or more cores), I don't think this is as much of a problem as it used to be on 2 core laptops.

Where stats are shared - these have not (in my experience) been anonymised sufficiently - and can be used to uniquely identify the source.

G : Has got its fingers burned a few times deliberately keeping details which they could then use for targeted advertising.

A : Has been introducing OS technologies to minimise resources used for App logs, Crash logs so that they are not persisted to disc (wasting io bandwidth) until a program goes belly up. This years 'call Apple when 3rd party App crashed' information ticked most of the boxes that I'd want as both a Dev and User.

I think the Buck mostly ends with the App developers. They have the chance to optimise their code (eg rewrite working code to use multiple cores & GPUs) - and but this introduces RISK, development effort, and in some cases less legible looking code making it less 'maintainable'. Others Deliberately want Bloat (massive splash screens for printer drivers .. and other junk).

Most of my 'beef' is of 'something needing to get out of the way' is with Apps...

AJ

 

[Craig Parkes]

Back to the OS, I want to be clear that there have been some positive advancements over the years too. I'm not completely dumping on A & M. I just think there are two agendas that are in a bit of conflict with each other. Consumer and professional. Consumers want all of the cool features that integrate their iPhones, tablets, with pop ups, notifications, etc. and professionals want an OS that is invisible and gets out of the way so you can get work done in an optimized way, utilizing only the resources necessary to get that work done.

The thing is, to get a well supported professional OS for the multimedia sector, you would have to engage a user base of professionals that need the stripped back and powerful OS which leverages the most up to date and expensive hardware. The price of the software that is targeted at such a user base costs many many times more than the standard desktop software because of the decreased potential user base, even accounting for the fact that such software can be pirated. It's often tied in to very expensive hardware offerings and only sold as turn key solutions.

So it's not like there isn't the option out there that you want - it's just that it's developed on Linux for mostly turn key boxes powering things like Baselight, where one suite is dedicated to one task.

The desktop revolution comes with it's problems - but it's all that consumer stuff that you don't need that keeps costs down on the platform you want.

 

[M.Halsell]

I'm actually optimistic for the personal assistant technology as it matures. Examples of mature applications of use could be intelligent notifications that a render or critical application has failed/or is complete, or being able to ask what tasks are hogging resources or creating a task list based on a conditional sets of variables such as triggering multiple copies or backups after a render has completed. Any current scripting based task system could be an early candidate for a virtual assistant.

There may be a significant upside after we get thru the early fodder of the new tech.

 

[Eren Ozkural]

I just want stability and for everything but the program I'm currently using to get the hell out of my way. I don't want a glorified Clippy listening in on me.

 

[Marc Wielage]

For those who know this stuff at a deeper level, i.e. Jeff, Eric, etc where do you stand on this? Do you feel it's heading in a good direction for the slice of the user base that doesn't feel the need for Siri on the Mac desktop or lots of things trying to run in the background? Does anyone else desire a clean, streamlined OS or am I just becoming the old guy resistant to change?

I think it's clear to a lot of audio/video professionals that Apple is kind of in the process of abandoning this market and becoming (mostly) a smartphone/tablet company that makes computers on the side. I've used Macs for 30 years, but a lot of what Apple has done with hardware in the last five years is pushing me towards Windows -- reluctantly.

The tools for pro sound editing and picture editing don't exist for Linux (in general). Avid and Premiere work brilliantly on both Mac and Windows. Linux is terrific for a lot of VFX applications, and ILM, Digital Domain, Sony Imageworks, and many similar companies use their tools on Linux. Resolve arguably works better on Linux than any other OS, and Baselight, Pablo, and Lustre are both optimized for Linux. My observation is that one OS won't do it all, and be warned that the problem with Linux is there are many apps that are very, very specific about which version of Linux works best. If you follow all the rules, get the right hardware, and dedicate the OS to just doing this one thing, it's extremely stable. When I've been on Linux systems, I think I'd count 2 or 3 crashes at most per month, vs. 2 or 3 a week on Mac.

 

[Steve Sherrick]

I think it's clear to a lot of audio/video professionals that Apple is kind of in the process of abandoning this market and becoming (mostly) a smartphone/tablet company that makes computers on the side. I've used Macs for 30 years, but a lot of what Apple has done with hardware in the last five years is pushing me towards Windows -- reluctantly.

The tools for pro sound editing and picture editing don't exist for Linux (in general). Avid and Premiere work brilliantly on both Mac and Windows. Linux is terrific for a lot of VFX applications, and ILM, Digital Domain, Sony Imageworks, and many similar companies use their tools on Linux. Resolve arguably works better on Linux than any other OS, and Baselight, Pablo, and Lustre are both optimized for Linux. My observation is that one OS won't do it all, and be warned that the problem with Linux is there are many apps that are very, very specific about which version of Linux works best. If you follow all the rules, get the right hardware, and dedicate the OS to just doing this one thing, it's extremely stable. When I've been on Linux systems, I think I'd count 2 or 3 crashes at most per month, vs. 2 or 3 a week on Mac.

Having an IT department that maintains those Linux systems is certainly ideal for the dedicated systems no doubt. And personally I'm trying to get away from Jack of all Trades, Master of None and focus most of my time on the creative editing side which certainly simplifies things and helps to optimize towards the NLE. But I have clients where sometimes I need to dabble in Resolve, send some dialogue through Pro Tools, etc. So inevitably I end up multitasking no matter what.

And then there is the dailies side of my world...

I should probably just be thankful that all of this technology is even accessible because when I first started in the business, I couldn't come close to affording any of it. Avid was something that you worked on at someone else's facility, not owned unless you were very established. So perhaps I should keep that in mind when complaining about the issues with the OS.

 

[L. Langer]

The tools for pro sound editing and picture editing don't exist for Linux (in general).

Respectively, Ardour and Lightworks. Made by professionals, for professional-grade uses. There are even Linux distros designed solely for media creation that differ from the mainstream distros in that they have the exact features that professionals need for real-time media work.

 

[Steve Sherrick]

Respectively, Ardour and Lightworks. Made by professionals, for professional-grade uses. There are even Linux distros designed solely for media creation that differ from the mainstream distros in that they have the exact features that professionals need for real-time media work.

Although those tools are certainly capable, there are plenty of reasons why we may still choose to edit on Avid. I have Lightworks and continue to monitor its progress. I have never used Ardour.

I'm being tempted here to get a Linux box up and running...

 

[M.Halsell]

I should probably just be thankful that all of this technology is even accessible because when I first started in the business, I couldn't come close to affording any of it. Avid was something that you worked on at someone else's facility, not owned unless you were very established. So perhaps I should keep that in mind when complaining about the issues with the OS.

I agree with you Steve, today we have lots of professional options. Yesteryear, par for the course was forming relationships with an assistant editor for access to an AVID MC or Symphony, junior sound guy for Protools or if you really hit the lottery you knew an assistant colorist that would give you AM/weekend access to DaVinci Resolve 888, 2K or 2K Plus. My first real workstation ownership experience was a Quadra 840 AV running Media 100. My mobile station now runs circles that beast.

We are in an enviable technology position for the most part, cheap access to powerful tools and cheap CPU computing cycles. But doesn't mean we don't always expect more. I will probably live just long enough to see one more huge paradigm shift in the way humans interface with computers. The next pandora's box is the discreet implementation of AI.The simple appliances now is just the start.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Cross compatibility package for Linux distros.

Cross compatibility package for Linux distros.

I was going to post a thread on this but here is a good placd.

Canonical has introduced their Snap sandboxed compatibility framework more broadely. The hope is that it eventually can be used on different distros to run software from other distros. That would be a way to have a pro distro but run a wider range of software. I imagine that there would he compromise the other way around.

At least a straight thinking solution.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/canonical-snap-univeral-linux-distro,32087.html

 

[L. Langer]

I'm being tempted here to get a Linux box up and running...

Any recent Intel/NVidia workstation you have within reach will be suitable and should install/run the most recent releases of any mainstream distro without any real guesswork on your part, unless you run into a UEFI bug. Just grab a spare SSD for the install - you don't need to touch any existing Windows install - of the distro of your choice and off you go. For safety sake, you may want to disconnect the Windows system drive from any computer you are going to use, so that you don't accidentally install Linux over it or alongside it on the same drive.

 

[Björn Benckert]

I don´t even know how many Irix, linux and RedHat machines I had trough the years. But to me they are no different from running a OSx or windows box.

But yes we treated the linux machines very differently. Pretty much it was one software per machine, Inferno, Flame, Conga, Cineon or such. Then no emails or downloads where done on those machines and updates and installs where only preformed by hired professionals or sysadmin and all files where reached to over the network and other machines where used to put the files onto the network. Simply put they where doing one task each and worked in a pretty closed environment.

If you treat a OS X or Win machine the same way, I´m sure it will run pretty stable.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Win machines probably still need to be optimised. In real time applications, like using as part of a camera with a camera head, it proved useful.

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Björn, what are you wearing in your photo?