Soos_R

Fiio might sound a bit better, but IMO not worth the price difference. I’d recommend Moondrop or CCA if you liked KZ. Moondrop Chu sound pretty neutral and blow anything at this price point out of the water basically, and CCA CA16 are warm with less clarity, but still nice sound overall.

Resolve is actually one of the tools which has allowed me to think about daily-driving Linux. And while it’s not FOSS it still feels much more open with the support for OFX plugins. There is also Natron which is FOSS and pretty competent as a compositor. And then blender. I’m learning CG in hopes of branching out as a generalist and blender is a prime example of FOSS being competitive with closed-source, industry-standard software.

Also since ML has become a part of my working process (speech recognition mostly at this point, but also had some projects with speech generation, audio clean-up, rotoscoping and other stuff) it sometimes feels like a part of my process is already easier in Linux. I’m no programmer, so setting up all the things for ML work might be challenging and let’s just say on Windows it doesn’t feel that intuitive. Always a step missing, a dependency which is outdated or incorrect etc. Working in Linux feels more streamlined and straightforward even though I know powershell better than terminal.

Just wanted to piggyback off your comment, since I work in video-production too and feel like it’s a niche that has been very closed-up up until very recently.

Regarding Apple — their products and solutions are at times incredible tools for our work which have little to no competition. When I decided to buy a tablet I had the option to buy an android device which is basically a media consumption tool and has little to no software applicable in my line of work, or an iPad, which has a ton of useful apps in its library. I can monitor several NDI sources and put up waveforms to check the picture while working in live production, I can use at least two different editing solutions (lumafusion and resolve) to create a rough-cut of a video, I have a set of powerful tools to use for still image editing and vector graphics, I even have a tool to create storyboards with 3D assets. Oh and if I wanted to, I could create these assets on the iPad too. It is also probably the best portable display in the industry with a toggle to output rec709 (not perfectly calibrated, but good enough for most cases I’d wager). And there is pretty much none of that on Android. So of course I will choose the option which satisfies my professional needs, or more precisely professional whims, since they are not must-have, but surely belong in the “really nice to have” category.

On the other hand, I have been working on a Windows PC for the last 10 years, because Mac pricing was atrocious until M1. They were underpowered and/or overpriced so heavily. And now I’m thinking about switching to Linux at least partially, since my workflow does not involve Adobe heavily anymore. Even our industry, which has been historically so closed and focused on making people use the same tools for atrocious prices, is slowly moving towards more openness.

The main takeaway related to the topic is this — sometimes you have an option to choose based on convenience, and in that case it always pays off to do research and compare different solutions. Some FOSS solutions can be state of the art, but less known because they have less marketing. But maybe an integrated closed ecosystem saves you precious time that could be spent doing something important, and that’s fine too. Sometimes you gotta choose based on necessity or approved working process, and then it’s really not much of a choice at all. I’m not going to quit my job because I can’t use open-source tools. People don’t need to be shamed for using Apple products (or any other closed solution) if they make their lives undeniably better in some way. But it is always a good thing to be on lookout for FOSS solutions, and in time figure out if you can make the switch and be one of the straws that breaks a mega-corporation’s back.