I just saw the revival of this topic and realized that I never answered your question about not going to Windows 10. I was a Windows developer starting with Win 3.1 in the early 90’s (in fact, started with Microsoft before DOS). I went through the dll hell, etc. And then the Balmer years. Need I say more.
IMO, Win 7 was the best of the bunch. Win 10 added deep spyware and the beginning of the adware that we see increasing today with no increase in user functionality. I will not bore you with a rant, but I will say that I did set up a Win 10 machine (now Win 11) just for Cantabile as I did with Win 7 before. I stripped it down to 70 running tasks, removing unnecessary garbage. And, it was running very well for some time (64 sample buffer, 44.1k, around 20-25% load with 15-20 plugins running) on a 4 year old laptop. Until 2 weeks ago, when I quickly connected to the internet (I had been offline for a year) to update my Cantabile license and Windows update started running and borked my machine. Reload and start over, the story of Windows.
Anyway, Linux has been my daily driver for the last 20 years. It is well suited as a music OS with a supported low latency kernel out of the box, no additional drivers needed, inter app connectivity, and so on. That being said, it is probably not a good business decision for Cantabile to run natively simply because the market is too small. It’s the same reason that I had to move my SME application to Windows many years ago, even though it was not the best choice technically.
Anyway, back to Wine. I tried it with Cantabile 3 about 2 years ago and got hung up finding the correct version of .NET. I tried again about 3 months ago and Cantabile 4 Lite installed and ran with no issues. I got busy on something else and did not take the time to get MIDI and audio working, although that should not be a big issue. It is a popular platform (Proton/Steam) with hard core gamers and they may be more latency obsessive than us.
I don’t know what your penetration is into the European market, but Linux is more popular there. Companies like Pianoteq and SurgeXT have Linux native support. Perhaps, it is worth taking a little time to see if you can have Cantabile play nice with Wine without changes to the app.
I really hope things will forward to linux.
I ask this mainly since, I was for years very reluctant to use linux, until now, I tried Mint on an old computer that barely runs videos in w10 in VLC and the browser and OMG, how smooth it runs everything !!! It’s amazing. So I would love to see it for my music, graphix and video production as well and get rid of this W10 and later w11 slowing down spyware.
In live performances I’ve encountered lots of (probably) w10 problems. Now I’m running Mint it’s incredible how this old revived laptop runs smoothly.
Something must be happening, because I’m trying to move to Linux as well. Installing WINE went really well, and Cantabile installed perfectly, and VST plugins were recognised and loaded straight away! Magic. But then despite getting MIDI events in I couldn’t get any sound out.
I tried all kinds of things, but the only audio engine which Cantabile seemed to like was ASIO4ALL, which had ‘Not connected’ displayed for every channel in the audio ports settings screen. Then I discovered this, and now it’s working perfectly: GitHub - wineasio/wineasio: ASIO to JACK driver for WINE
I say perfectly, there are weird things happening with some apps and plugins (text not displaying etc) but I assume those are known WINE issues for which there will be a workaround. So far I’ve only tried OB-XD and Solaris, but they chain up together and sound great.
One small thing: I’d like to use free Cantabile on an old laptop to power a keyboard (I don’t need any of the paid-for features), but the only license available to my email address is my paid one (Solo). Is this a WINE problem, a fresh install problem, or a me problem?
I’ve been noticing Microsoft “fatigue” and strong interest in Linux among colleagues. It might have something to do with them retiring all our certifications and shunting MS Partners off to aggregators. The aggressive in-system “nudging” and unending forced minor UI changes along with their ever-evolving licensing schemes might be part of it. I’ve moved some of my server needs over Digital Ocean droplets running Ubuntu. I’m enjoying learning Linux and getting ready to convert an old laptop.