31–40 of 193 posts
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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.
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> 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.
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> 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 d…
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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.
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.
He 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…
My recollections of Linux audio issues are more from the days when one thing might want to use OSS and another ALSA and you might have to fiddle around and enable software mixing in some ALSA configuration files to get non-exclusive sound to work. And then some issues right around when Pulse first started to be a thing. But really it's been a "Just Works" for me for years and years.
Interested to see what he chooses to work on now
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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.
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Eh, Pulseaudio. One of those things that on the rare occasion it's worked out of the box it's then broken with one step of the beaten path. Evidently it seems to work for many people, the trouble it's caused has far outweighed any benefit (plus I know quite a few people dropped firefox for chrome when it went pulseaudio only - is that still the case?).
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…
Separately the company I worked for ditched it as well due to the issues, to be fair though in tnat case since they only needed a single - reliable - audio output so there was no case of PA anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh dear.. I'm not going to comment on that. I don't think it's productive.
> I never experienced any trouble with audio
I refer to stuff alsa drivers reporting wrong values[0] or cards being locked to a specific rate [1]
Before pulseaudio only one application could access the sound card. And alsa-mixer was broken half of the time. The list of defects goes on and on. Configuration relied on different settings of also that needed to be tuned for each driver separately. Getting sound to work on Linux was not a fun place to be.[2]
Pulseaudio exposed all these problems using a unified interface and forced "us" to fix these bugs.
[0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/410887
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/1034325263.474.37.camel@diesel/T...
[2] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/configuring-linux-sound...