There appears to be something rather interesting and possibly “Game Changing” (massive pun intended) going on in the operating system world which may well turn out to be beneficial to us “Audio folks” eventually.
Recently computer gaming Giant “Valve” released a linux based operating system built specifically for the purpose of running its high processing demand games and not a lot else.
Cutting all the extra operating system baggage out of the way when you want exclusive access to your computers power sounds like a great idea for the DAW world too and its been tried already years ago with offerings such as BEOS, there are also DAW integrated Linux OS’s such as Musix amongst others, but what really needs to happen is for one of the “Big Boys” in the DAW industry to take a leap of faith in the hope that others will follow.
Well I may be a little premature but it looks like Cakewalk (Now owned by Tascam) have made the first move towards this idea by partnering up and offering Sonar X3 for sale through the Steam purchase and management portal. (See their facebook post from the 18th of December 2013)
Its not totally apparent whether there is an intention to actually port the DAW to the Steam OS but it would certainly be a great thing, there are already groups of users assembling on the Cakewalk dicussion pages asking for a full on linux version.
What does this mean for us Pro Tools users?
Well……nothing yet, but it might be the whisperings of getting the popular DAW’s to take a serious look at hosting their software on something fresh, new and lightweight. It’s certainly about time if you ask me !
Would you like to see a future where there is a very lightweight unobtrustive or even invisible OS, where you power on your computer and boot straight into Pro Tools ?