SR1 - It seems ideological because you seem to take it pretty personally, and seem to have absolutely no empathy for what everyone in this thread, ostensibly all of them musicians, are saying. Instead you're accusing them of being lazy and uncreative. Nice one

If this is the attitude of all Linux programmers, I'm not at all surprised that the applications are so inferior.
Well in many ways you're right about the music industry, but IMHO that's not really a valid statement in this case. Why should anyone use something that's functionally inferior, offers no clear advantage (other than maybe some kind of grand utopian open source ideology) and requires complex workarounds and trawling through arcane forums for solutions? Why should a musician have to compile apps? Isn't this the job of the programmer?
How is this progression? Why do something differently if it wastes more time and is less efficient? How does this improve the life of a musician trying to get something done in an industry where it's harder than ever to earn money to survive? There are many creative things musicians can do with their time, things that are genuinely new, progressive and interesting (Monomes, Max/MSP, building custom controllers - just a few examples)
There's more than enough to learn with just a well-functioning sequencer and some complex plugins. Put even more pointless and complex variables into this mix and it's getting unusable. Most sane people would rather pay a programmer to write something really good that is an efficient, well-integrated and logical solution. I know a lot of programmers, and I'd like them to have an income

It works out pretty well both ways in the reality we live in, which I'm not defending - just accepting it for what it is... reality.
Again, I'm not dissing Linux as a platform for all uses. It has good uses for custom development implementations, embedded situations, low-cost business applications and so on.