Hi,
We've thought about this issue and came up with a conclusion:
At this moment the Manager component (software that runs out of the I/O racks) will run on Linux, on a very lightweight Linux distribution, such as Lubuntu or Xubuntu. We are still testing both and will eventually decided which one we prefer. Of course there will be no problem in running it on any other Linux distribution if one wishes to, we are just low balling the hardware requirements so you can run the Manager on a small format (cheap) dedicated computer. - remember we are aiming to an affordable solution.
We have discarded OS X and Windows for several reasons, one, because you will want to run on separate computer so you have keyboard focus all the time, second, also to avoid having to maintain 2 different software versions, third reduce costs (licenses). For this reason, Linux was an obvious candidate. The main application lib we'll be using for the Manager (and other apps) is Qt.
The main trigger for this decision, was when we decided we wished the user to be able to interact with the manager both through the console keyboard and the computer keyboard. So, if one wants to use the computer keyboard, one need keyboard focus, so if you have the Manager installed on the same computer as your DAW (which was the original idea) you would then have to switch between applications to have keyboard focus, which really sucked!! Having a separated computer was a must for this.
To keep costs and hardware/OS requirements low, Linux was an obvious choice. It will also have the benefit we could concentrate only in one software version and not two (Windows/OS X).
Cheers,
Artur
