Windows 10 support ends - Are you interested in Linux support by FAS?

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To revisit this, I’ve been running Axe-Edit III on Fedora for about five years now, and it’s been working great overall. The only real issue I’ve encountered is a disappearing cursor bug, which makes editing tricky. There’s a discussion on the forums about patching it, and as of now, the patch is still required. I’ve already patched the necessary files and uploaded them to my GitHub, so you can just drag and drop them into the Wine Axe-Edit directory. Once patched, it works perfectly.

In terms of performance, Axe-Edit III runs flawlessly on Linux after the cursor fix. There are no other issues and it runs 1:1 with the Windows version, wait it actually runs better than the Windows version. Forgot about the weird font rendering bug I had a few months back when Microsoft switched aliasing on Windows 11 (to fix Edge/Chromium stuff from what I looked up at the time.) Even Fractal-Bot works for updates, and I’ve never had a problem updating my firmware on Linux.

Regarding official Linux support, I think it’s worth considering. Linux has seen significant growth in the consumer market thanks to devices like the Raspberry Pi, Steam Deck, and Intel NUCs. And since the software already works nearly perfectly on Linux with Wine, adding official support might not require much effort—possibly just a winewrapper.

TL;DR: Axe-Edit III already works great on Linux (Fedora) once you patch the cursor.

This comment was made by a RedHat shill.
 
Do you have any references on that? I've never heard that before and I worked in a large VMware environment and also supported a small-ish KVM environment.

These days I'm only supporting Azure systems which is Hyper-V behind the scenes.

Apparently not. I looked but can't find it again; it was years ago. I'll defer to FPFL's claims and admit that I was misinformed.

OK I have to jump in here. This @marsonic KVM idea is 100% wrong.
I work for VMware and have for 16 years. I have the bona fides. : )

Fair enough. I was misinformed.

I definitely was a fan of VMWare's student discount for years - it was quite a bit simpler and more capable than the other options. I did run ESXi for a while at home (since switched to proxmox), and I definitely don't hate them. Apparently the accusations were unfounded. I apologize.
 
GPL doesn't concern me at all. Neither do commercial licenses. The world needs, and has, a lot of choices.

That the Linux community is so ready argue with itself, and is so forked and fragmented in distros? It makes being a developer that also does support for that ecosystem of things a good bit harder than the fanboys of an ideal want to admit. Most of the loudest fanboys don't write any code; actual developers are often a lot more reasonable. They've lived it
The fragmentation and forked options of Linux is what makes it great. You're not forced to accept security policies or the install size or the license of just one flavor of Linux because you have lots to choose from. You choose what works for you. And yet the software is 99% compatible among any Linux distro you choose. At worst you'll need to install additional libraries to get anything to work. Windows and macOS are not easier at all for a developer. There will always be more "things" that you are forced to implement/change on software for Windows and macOS than for Linux by the very nature of their oppressive "our way or the highway" point-of-view. Apple is the worst in this regard in my experience. I've written software for all three.

There really aren't a lot of commercial linux apps compared to Windows and Mac. It's a sliver of a sliver and it's not changing bc the reasons why that was so 5, 10 and 15 years ago haven't changed.
There aren't a lot of commercial Linux apps because the free ones do just fine. Paying for apps when you can get better ones for free is not very smart. So trying to sell commercial apps when there already are existing ones that are mature doesn't happen. Those commercial apps written with 5 or 50 developers can't compete with open-source when hundreds or thousands of developers are looking at the code.
There's lots of great open, free, etc software for Linux so it's not a crisis, Linux distros are great. I've been using one or another for a long, long time, but I don't pretend it's the bright future of audio or a good investment for most small companies like Fractal. It isn't.
You might be right. Fractal doesn't have to do anything. But the open source community doesn't need their permission to write their own Axe Edit software either. If, heaven forbid, something should happen to FAS and they no longer update their hardware, you'll be waiting for Firmware Friday from that open source community that are the only ones left making updates. Because of this, anyone who understands this point would be more willing to invest in a hardware if there were some support for open source environments because it would mean there would be more hope for updates even if the company goes away.
It's a great server OS, it changed the world!
Also a great desktop... for nerds and tweakers, and that is enough.

and I've said enough. Thread wrap for me.

Be well!
Same to you!
 
Apparently not. I looked but can't find it again; it was years ago. I'll defer to FPFL's claims and admit that I was misinformed.



Fair enough. I was misinformed.

I definitely was a fan of VMWare's student discount for years - it was quite a bit simpler and more capable than the other options. I did run ESXi for a while at home (since switched to proxmox), and I definitely don't hate them. Apparently the accusations were unfounded. I apologize.
No need to apologize. I wasn’t mad 😁
We’re all musicians first and foremost here.

I like this forum bc it’s more friendly and that’s always my intent too.

Be well
 
I’ve already patched the necessary files and uploaded them to my GitHub, so you can just drag and drop them into the Wine Axe-Edit directory. Once patched, it works perfectly.
Great! Could you please explain what in detailed needs to be done with your patch? Just copy it here? Is the libaxe-edit-cursor.so automatically executed by wine/bottles while executing the AXE-Edit III.exe? Isn't it a shell script which need to be started before?

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The only real issue I’ve encountered is a disappearing cursor bug, which makes editing tricky. There’s a discussion on the forums about patching it, and as of now, the patch is still required
The patch is actually no longer required for me on Arch. No idea since how long that is the case, but I removed it while experimenting with the redraw issue recently and found that it makes no difference.
As you're not mentioning the redraw issue, are you not affected by it under Fedora with the latest Axe-Edit? Or are you using dxvk to fix it? See https://forum.fractalaudio.com/thre...r-rendering-issue-in-axe-edit-1-13-08.200581/ if you don't know what I'm talking about.
 
The patch is actually no longer required for me on Arch. No idea since how long that is the case, but I removed it while experimenting with the redraw issue recently and found that it makes no difference.
As you're not mentioning the redraw issue, are you not affected by it under Fedora with the latest Axe-Edit? Or are you using dxvk to fix it? See https://forum.fractalaudio.com/thre...r-rendering-issue-in-axe-edit-1-13-08.200581/ if you don't know what I'm talking about.
I use Bottles under Ubuntu incl. dxvk and I have the redraw issue (rerendering of the AXEEdit window) still from time to time. I copied the shared object into the program folder of Axe Edit in Bottles. Do I need to extract it manually or is that been done automatically?
 
Rerendering with LatencyFlex option enabled gets better (w/o the so file patch). But the RTA block reaction is still too slow.

Bildschirmfoto vom 2025-01-22 17-41-55.png
 
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I use Bottles under Ubuntu incl. dxvk and I have the redraw issue (rerendering of the AXEEdit window) still from time to time. I copied the shared object into the program folder of Axe Edit in Bottles. Do I need to extract it manually or is that been done automatically?
I think you misunderstood something here. The mouse issue Boomer mentions is an old problem unrelated to the rendering issue where Axe Edit itself rendered fine but the mouse cursor turned invisible, see this post https://forum.fractalaudio.com/thre...aring-mouse-cursor.138625/page-2#post-2310033 for a description of the fix. As I said it seems to no longer be neccessary on my end.
 
The patch is actually no longer required for me on Arch. No idea since how long that is the case, but I removed it while experimenting with the redraw issue recently and found that it makes no difference.
As you're not mentioning the redraw issue, are you not affected by it under Fedora with the latest Axe-Edit? Or are you using dxvk to fix it? See https://forum.fractalaudio.com/thre...r-rendering-issue-in-axe-edit-1-13-08.200581/ if you don't know what I'm talking about.
I'll have to give DXVK a spin, I've just been regularly updating Axe Edit on my end and running a new instance in Lutris every once and a while. I still have the cursor issue running without my patch on Lutris so DXVK is probably the fix for it.
Great! Could you please explain what in detailed needs to be done with your patch? Just copy it here? Is the libaxe-edit-cursor.so automatically executed by wine/bottles while executing the AXE-Edit III.exe? Isn't it a shell script which need to be started before?

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I am unfamiliar with bottles, however I have two files on my GitHub meant for Wine/Lutris directly. First the cursor.so has to be copied and on my GitHub page, there is an "axeedit3" bash script for running Axe Edit. Lutris allows for bash scripts to run at startup so I run it in there, for vanilla wine it has to be ran separately. I presume bottles functions similarly.

However, I am going to look into what @l4mpi said and see if enabling DXVK over wine fixes it as it's the better option as it should have less issues with the compositor. I'll update my findings here.
 
Ever since Steve Jobs made my Gil Amelio Imax Quadra clone a doorstop 6 months after I bought it by upgrading the OS to be incompatible with my clone and they capped my warranty replacement of my iPhone 3GS after the third replacement due to charging port excessive wear, I said I would rather wear napalm ignited underwear than purchase another Apple product.

They churn for the new purchase with accelerated obsolescence.
Unfortunately, the only alternative to Apple for Smart Phones any more is Google. Device support is per manufacturer and most suck beyond a year or two. The only company more invasive than Google when it comes to your privacy is Facebook. Google is also known for offering half-bakes solutions for things then instead of improving it killing it off after 5-10 years.
 
I was contemplating all this back in September. Installed Ubuntu and went on the hunt for all of my music stuff. I found only a fraction of what I had at the time, and even after stripping out old and/or redundant stuff I just couldn't justify losing so much by switching to Linux. That said, I've set up a total of 3 Linux laptops that I now use as a sandbox for work (container stuff mostly) along with just being able to speak intelligently about *nix stuff.

I went Mac (Mac Studio M2 Ultra) for all studio stuff instead and couldn't be happier. Shortly after I upgraded our gaming laptops to Win11. I have a small Focusrite 2i2 interface hooked up along with a Native Instruments S61 Mk2 and have to say....while midi stuff is far easier on Windows, nothing else is anymore (in my mind, at least for audio stuff). I immediately started looking for ways to change the look and feel back to something more comfy (Win10). No more taskbar on the top? Surely you jest? NOPE! Locking small stuff like that down just irked the crap outta me. Start11 from Stardock didn't even give me back what I lost. Glad I went Mac in the studio.

Yeh, I'm late to this party, but there's my $0.02 worth.
 
But it is possible right now. https://quantumzeitgeist.com/how-to-buy-a-quantum-computer/


Okay, but that hasn't happened at all. There are no strict limitations. Even if they passed a law in the US, the real danger comes from other countries that are banking on hacking wealth out of the US.

I don't remember saying it would happen overnight. Some things might happen overnight, but mostly it will be on the news for a long time. First with banks and bitcoin and where the big easy money is. Then national security, personal information and media being held for ransom. It's going to be a dumpster fire that might start slowly, or explodes onto the scene. To be clear, I never said that I know the FAS firmware wasn't encrypted, I know nothing about it and don't care to look. But if it isn't, that would be a huge mistake if it's true, quantum computing or not. I have a background in software and if you aren't protecting your software, someone else will be selling it soon.

I agree with everything you're saying. But I never said I hoped or even wanted FAS to open source their code. But, if they don't already use encryption on their firmware, then they've essentially open-sourced their code already.
Just a quick response to this following some further reading.

The risk posed by quantum decryption is not as extensive as many might fear. Even AES-256 is only reduced to the equivalent of AES-128 in terms of time taken to break, which is still acceptable. Same is true for hashing algorithms like SHA-512. This means that private key encryption using many of the current methods is basically fine. Things encrypted using public key methods like RSA are vulnerable. However, there are alternatives, which as I guessed in my earlier post, are already available for use.

So my take away from all this is that older firmwares, IF they were encrypted, might be at risk of decryption. I'm not sure that would be a problem for FAS because of the point I made in my previous post about the intelligibility of anything that extensive after disassembly. If the firmware wasn't encrypted it would appear that the argument that FAS algorithms are at risk is already moot.

Regarding open source software in general: I LOVE open source software, but I must re-assert the opinion that it is amazing in terms of it's contribution to the intellectual realm of the abstract, but a lot less amazing in terms of the practical applications of real world software. You can read up on why open source has only been partially adopted in so many places in plenty of articles on the subject elsewhere. TLDR; open source incentivises lower quality code in the realms of SaaS and IaaS under certain circumstances, and can detrimentally affect sales volumes and after market support adoption. There is a seemingly inevitable swing towards partial adoption of open source in the commercial sectors, and I don't expect this to change, but it's a complex route to navigate and won't be right for many businesses, especially (I would wager), SMEs who could quickly lose ground to smaller lightweight indie development companies, or even worse, bigger players with more financial clout.

That said, I can see why open sourcing the Edit software looks on the face of it like something that wouldn't detrimentally impact FAS, as long as it was maintained as an unsupported option, but then again if I were FAS I'd be very reluctant to put my support team under the additional stress that would doubtless ensue when the open source bake-offs started doing unexpected things to the FAS hardware. Over time that would improve and could produce more resilient hardware and software, but you can understand why there is inertia when it comes to any decision about even a partial move to open source.
 
I LOVE open source software, but I must re-assert the opinion that it is amazing in terms of it's contribution to the intellectual realm of the abstract, but a lot less amazing in terms of the practical applications of real world software.

I have mixed feelings about this claim, as I use > 90% open source software in my day job.

All our servers run Linux. They all run Apache. They all run MariaDB. All of my computers for years have relied heavily on GNU or BSD userland tools. My job and half my CS degree wouldn't be doable without OpenSSH. I think most of the web runs on OpenSSL. We use open source version control, just like almost everybody (git, subversion, etc. are all open). A few people use SublimeText, but all the really tech-y people still use vim.

Most of the individual applications are open, or at least partially open. One of them is a PHP application with <5% of the code obfuscated, and I've contributed to it to fix problems we had. There's one part of it that's fundamentally broken because the developer doesn't understand one specific file format (and refuses to admit it)....the only reason I haven't sent him replacement code is that we don't really need that specific format and apparently no one else does either. Instead, we modified it to output a different format that's simpler, and there are open source tools to convert from the simple format to the more complex one that work perfectly (IOW, integrating the change would be pretty simple). I did send that code upstream, and he didn't care (it's one developer, and he's really convinced he's right despite all evidence to the contrary).

Another of our big projects is based on an open source app that we're having to modify. It's valid to say that your assertion that it isn't "amazing in terms of practical applications" is kind of correct - but we can change it. Whether we end up contributing to upstream is going to depend on exactly what we end up changing when all is said and done (the changes are more like customizations than fixes so far).

Half our company uses LibreOffice, and some have switched to it from MS Office because it can open bigger spreadsheets than Excel. When they still have problems, GNU Tools come to the rescue again.

The only place where open source software really falls flat on its face is with creative applications. Our graphics department uses Adobe Suite because GiMP is decades behind in terms of user friendliness and capabilities. I can't use Ardour or anything else I've found for the music things, and there definitely are plugins I can't replace. I could with a significantly higher budget and going hybrid...but I honestly prefer ITB. There are no open source photography-focused editors as good as CaptureOne (my preference) and Lightroom...not by a long shot.

So, yeah....I have a very different view of its viability in professional contexts - bad for creative, good for basically everything else.

As for the quantum computing stuff....I'm just not convinced yet. I'm not saying it won't happen, just that I think the tech is far behind where people fear it is. And, I'm not totally convinced it matters as far as governments are concerned. It'd be a lot easier to break Copilot and the other spyware being integrated into modern OSs than to break encryption that way.
 
Unfortunately, the only alternative to Apple for Smart Phones any more is Google. Device support is per manufacturer and most suck beyond a year or two. The only company more invasive than Google when it comes to your privacy is Facebook. Google is also known for offering half-bakes solutions for things then instead of improving it killing it off after 5-10 years.
I can keep an android phone for 5 years before it physically breaks even with protective screens and cases.

To me that's an improvement over needing an iPhone replaced every 3 months after the charging port decides to fail and break.
 
I can keep an android phone for 5 years before it physically breaks even with protective screens and cases.

To me that's an improvement over needing an iPhone replaced every 3 months after the charging port decides to fail and break.

I've actually had really good luck with my iPhone SE. It's at least several years old, and I only bought it because my last (Android) phone died a horrible death and I needed a replacement same day.

I should probably say that I literally give zero fraks about phones. They're all the same as far as I'm concerned, meaning that they pretty much all run the few apps I actually need and at this point none of them can be trusted to actually be secure. I literally pick them based on the biggest screen size I'm willing to carry and the lowest price I can find....other than that one day when I needed it right away more than I needed it cheap.
 
Just a quick response to this following some further reading.

The risk posed by quantum decryption is not as extensive as many might fear. Even AES-256 is only reduced to the equivalent of AES-128 in terms of time taken to break, which is still acceptable. Same is true for hashing algorithms like SHA-512. This means that private key encryption using many of the current methods is basically fine. Things encrypted using public key methods like RSA are vulnerable. However, there are alternatives, which as I guessed in my earlier post, are already available for use.
Interesting.

Can you point me to references for this take on how little quantum computing will change encryption vulnerability?

My unresearched impression is that QC is orders of magnitude faster, but maybe I'm just hearing hype.
 
I can keep an android phone for 5 years before it physically breaks even with protective screens and cases.

To me that's an improvement over needing an iPhone replaced every 3 months after the charging port decides to fail and break.
Hmm, never experienced that myself and I've been using iPhones since the 3GS. Now that both use USB-C the port reliability is most certainly the same.
 
My unresearched impression is that QC is orders of magnitude faster, but maybe I'm just hearing hype.

Please take all of this with a grain of salt.

It is, but there are caveats.

There was a story that came out not long ago about random number generation - Google's QC team claimed that their QC could generate true random numbers in either minutes or hours in a way that would take a supercomputer many, many years to rival. Almost immediately, one of the super computer teams did it in ~2 days. IIRC, they did it by simulating what a QC would do.

Generating random numbers is MUCH simpler than breaking modern encryption. If nothing else, it requires many fewer qbits.

There's another complication that a good number of the qbits in any quantum computer end up being devoted to something like error correction.

And, all of the answers a QC will come up with are probabilistic in nature. The idea is kind of (very loosely) to try every possible solution to a problem and then pick the right one. It's an ingenious idea...but at present, it's not really guaranteed to actually pick the right one without verification....which tends to be a LOT faster than actually coming up with the solution (based on the P vs NP problem).

At least...that's how I understand it. The math is somewhat beyond me, and I only understand this stuff at a surface level.

But, overall, it seems a lot like a handful of other relatively modern "advancements" that make huge promises and haven't really delivered yet. I'm definitely not saying that it never will deliver, and it's possible that there are "secret" projects that are far more advanced. But at least when I see people dumbing down the results of research to the point that I think I understand it...it's still very underwhelming.

Or...encryption is broken and we haven't been told because that would be a total cataclysm for the global economy.
 
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