Thank you for developing and maintaining such a fantastic piece of software!
And thanks to you and @prokoudine for this great series of interviews.
I was very surprised to read:
> But we do now generally tell new users "You don't have to use JACK. And in fact, if you don't use JACK, your initial experience is going to be a lot easier". That's particularly true for MIDI devices. Most people using JACK2 have to go through some extra loops to actually get hardware to show up. Whereas if they use the ALSA backend on Linux, it just works.
>
> So JACK will be there, we will suggest and make it more and more obvious that JACK is not the obvious thing for you to use.
I recently helped a friend setting up his Linux laptop to record audio (USB interface, mics to record acoustic instruments). I installed Ubuntu 20.04 and used the great Ubuntu Studio tools to setup JACK [1]. It's still a pain, as you mention, to save/restore session states for my friend, and to setup the settings for latency Vs. xruns.
My friend doesn't need to route audio from one program to another, so I guess he could just use ALSA directly, but then how can he monitor/optimize the latency?
I've read several articles about this, from US, UK and French sources, and none of them mention alternatives like Jitsi. Is it just a lack of knowledge?
I've tried Zoom once, it was a disaster. I've tried Jitsi, it was much better. Moreover, Jitsi doesn't require any installation on the client side, and you can host your instance or join an existing one (you trust).
We use IRC at work, but I think when you setup an open source project community, you have to think carefully. IRC is for instant communication. If parts of your community are located in a timezone that is only online when you (the maintainer of the project) are not, that will create frustration, unless you start setting up all kind of bouncers or tools to let you be online at all time. In the end, I tend to prefer forums or mailing lists, because people writing can elaborate a bit more, and receive more meaningful feedback later on... but I guess I'm old school :)