My god the comments in this thread are terrible. How can grown ass adults be so pathetically mean to a single person because he wrote (free & gratis!) software they don't like. Seriously, it's mystifying.
PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
21–30 of 193 posts
Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
#22He can easily hop ship wherever he wants given the major impact he's landed in PulseAudio, Systemd and elsewhere. His design decisions have certainly been controversial but his impact is certainly agreed upon.
I think that Redhat gave him a privileged position to make that impact from, and I'm not sure that he'll make a similar impact without similar political backing, but I suppose time will tell.
It's a fact of life that people get old and thus become less effective at making great changes. I cannot think of many counter-examples from our field.
Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
#23He can easily hop ship wherever he wants given the major impact he's landed in PulseAudio, Systemd and elsewhere. His design decisions have certainly been controversial but his impact is certainly agreed upon.
I've been using linux for decades and by far -- by a HUGE margin -- PulseAudio has been the most annoying and broken thing I had to use. I'm still baffled by how something as basic as audio output can be eternally fragile in linux! And before you say you might have quirky hardware: my daily laptop is a Lenovo X1 Carbon 7th gen. Now (since 2021) I use PipeWire and tbh do not know to what extent pulseaudio codebase is…
The only way Pulseaudio is palatable is by using the Pulseaudio sink in Jack.
Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
#24Is he retiring? Is it time for champagne?
That depends very much on where he lands. Rumors have it that Linus is considering transferring kernel maintainer duties so let's not put the flag out just yet.
Ok, just kidding ;)
Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
#25He can easily hop ship wherever he wants given the major impact he's landed in PulseAudio, Systemd and elsewhere. His design decisions have certainly been controversial but his impact is certainly agreed upon.
I've been using linux for decades and by far -- by a HUGE margin -- PulseAudio has been the most annoying and broken thing I had to use. I'm still baffled by how something as basic as audio output can be eternally fragile in linux! And before you say you might have quirky hardware: my daily laptop is a Lenovo X1 Carbon 7th gen. Now (since 2021) I use PipeWire and tbh do not know to what extent pulseaudio codebase is…
> I'm still baffled by how something as basic as audio output can be eternally fragile in linux
Yeah, broken drivers.
You see, before pulseaudio came along, audio drivers were barely used and needed to be tuned for each use case. Most drivers barely implemented ALSA, almost none correctly. If you wanted fancy features (say; software input mixing, so that more than just one application can actually output sound) you needed to invest a lot of time.
By making all these fancy features (and more) more easily available, pulseaudio exposed all these bugs in the drivers.
And of course it got flak for that because the first software layer the user is confronted with is blamed if something's not working.
But actually - just as systemd - pulseaudio is a marvelous piece of code. That today we can get to an even higher level with PipeWire is to large degrees only possible because of pulseaudio.
Lennart Poettering is one of the most creative and influential system-space developers that Linux has. It's a shame that he's so maltreated by the peanut gallery.
Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what kind of audio configurations you've lived with. I do remember when PulseAudio seemed to be the source of many problems, but this was over a decade ago. One of the big problems is that the Linux audio stack is built out of components that rely on assumptions about the next lower level of the stack that are often untrue. You might assume that your audio hardware has a volume control, assume it can per…
> If you have sufficiently boring PC hardware and sufficiently boring use cases, the audio will just kind of work anyway, without PulseAudio. Introducing breakage, complexity and general fragility to the common case, which was previously working fine, will obviously make a whole lot of people upset.
Linux audio was never working fine. It was a mess of broken drivers and incompatible implementations.
I cannot fathom how people are able to repress the memory of how bad Linux audio was before pulseaudio.
Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you have sufficiently boring PC hardware and sufficiently boring use cases, the audio will just kind of work anyway, without PulseAudio. Introducing breakage, complexity and general fragility to the common case, which was previously working fine, will obviously make a whole lot of people upset.
Linux audio was never working fine. It was a mess of broken drivers and incompatible implementations. I cannot fathom how people are able to repress the memory of how bad Linux audio was before pulseaudio.
I never experienced any trouble with audio in linux before pulseaudio. There is no memory repression here; only gaslighting from you, telling me I experienced something I didn't.
Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what kind of audio configurations you've lived with. I do remember when PulseAudio seemed to be the source of many problems, but this was over a decade ago. One of the big problems is that the Linux audio stack is built out of components that rely on assumptions about the next lower level of the stack that are often untrue. You might assume that your audio hardware has a volume control, assume it can per…
> If you have sufficiently boring PC hardware and sufficiently boring use cases, the audio will just kind of work anyway, without PulseAudio. Introducing breakage, complexity and general fragility to the common case, which was previously working fine, will obviously make a whole lot of people upset.
Audio in Linux before PA certainly wasn't working fine. Turning off your mp3 player and restarting your browser, because you want to play youtube via flash plugin? Sorry, but that's not fine.
I had my share of hardware, and PA had problem with only one piece (a nettop with Nvidia Ion2, audio via hdmi). It turned out that the hardware couldn't really play 44,1 kHz audio, it's clock was too unreliable and resulted in drop outs. PA couldn't fix the hardware, but could resample everything to 48 kHz on CPU, and with that there was no playback problem.
So yes, it exposed problems, and it forced to fix them. We are all better off today for that.
Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been using linux for decades and by far -- by a HUGE margin -- PulseAudio has been the most annoying and broken thing I had to use. I'm still baffled by how something as basic as audio output can be eternally fragile in linux! And before you say you might have quirky hardware: my daily laptop is a Lenovo X1 Carbon 7th gen. Now (since 2021) I use PipeWire and tbh do not know to what extent pulseaudio codebase is…
> I'm still baffled by how something as basic as audio output can be eternally fragile in linux Yeah, broken drivers. You see, before pulseaudio came along, audio drivers were barely used and needed to be tuned for each use case. Most drivers barely implemented ALSA, almost none correctly. If you wanted fancy features (say; software input mixing, so that more than just one application can actually output sound) you n…
Driver issues, right.. is that why my archived shell histories have hundreds if not thousands of entries for `pulseaudio --kill ; puslseaudio --start` ? Does restarting the userland sound daemon reset the drivers operating in kernel space? How would that work?
Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what kind of audio configurations you've lived with. I do remember when PulseAudio seemed to be the source of many problems, but this was over a decade ago. One of the big problems is that the Linux audio stack is built out of components that rely on assumptions about the next lower level of the stack that are often untrue. You might assume that your audio hardware has a volume control, assume it can per…
> If you have sufficiently boring PC hardware and sufficiently boring use cases, the audio will just kind of work anyway, without PulseAudio. Introducing breakage, complexity and general fragility to the common case, which was previously working fine, will obviously make a whole lot of people upset.
What kind of breakage, complexity, and general fragility are you seeing with PulseAudio? Can you elaborate?
One big problem here is that the "good path" for audio without PulseAudio applies to a shrinking segment of Linux user base.