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PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

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Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#91

Post by sophacles »

zozbot234 wrote: post #87
sophacles wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my point of view as an old guy who remembers the hell of init scripts, what they did was make an alternative to remembering arcane details of how each os and distro chose to set up their scripts. This: * made debugging a random system a lot more straight forward * made putting up software for packaging a lot easier * made customizing the start-up of a daemon a lot easier (this ties in with the first point) * mad…

These "simple" use cases break when you need to do anything even slightly more complex than whatever the systemD designers envisioned for the user. And if you try to submit an issue upstream, the typical response is "you're holding it wrong" or equivalent. This lack of a consistent design might be excusable when first trying to support a bunch of entirely novel use cases, but let's not pretend that it doesn't come wi…

I have yet to encounter something that systemd doesn't do OK or well. What is your example of something that systemd can't handle that was better handled by init scripts?

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#92

Post by nathants »

traverseda wrote: post #66
zozbot234 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's not Poettering, it's the Gnome folks in general. These controversies have been around since the early Gnome 2.x days. Nothing much has changed. What we really need is for people to propose alternatives to systemD that address its purported use cases while removing some of the needless complexity it introduces, and restoring the primacy of general mechanisms over hacked-together policy. This has happened with…

OpenRC and alpine are nice.

this is the way.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#93

Post by pydry »

evol262 wrote: post #77
traverseda wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When his employer uses politics to try to coerce others into using that "free & gratis" software it can leave a bit of a bitter taste in your mouth. It's not that something like pulseaudio is bad so we can just ignore it, it's that pulseaudio is bad because because redhat funds a lot of gnome stuff gnome won't really work unless you use pulseaudio, and since you use gnome you now have to use systemd. If pulseaudio ju…

Desktop Linux is not Red Hat's core business and it hasn't been for a long, long time. Way before pulse or systemd. This is, fundamentally, a gross misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the way that open source works in general, and of the way Red Hat-employed developers in particular interacted with the ecosystem. I was in the engineering side in various positions for nearly a decade. The policy was upstream firs…

Never saw anything wrong with upstart. I used it for a few years and was pissed when it was unceremoniously dumped because of weird debian politics, effectively killing the project.

I'd have had more respect for systemd if it truly were crowned because people liked it rather than because of a ~7 person vote.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#94

Post by ElectricalUnion »

kyruzic wrote: post #15
zh3 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?).

Pulseaudio is one of the absolute best parts of Linux. Have fun routing audio from one stream to one device and another stream to a different device on Windows or macos!

Jack is better. PipeWire, much better. Routing audio in Pulseaudio is confusing, at best, and _not fun_ most of the time.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#95

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

esarbe wrote: post #72
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because he wrote (free & gratis!) software they don't like I don't think you understand what the story was.

That's the story; he proposed new software and his employer liked the idea and paid him to develop that idea. End of story. People getting mad because they are "forced" to use a free software system? That's the fan-fiction from the peanut gallery.

> That's the story; he proposed new software and his employer liked the idea and paid him to develop that idea. End of story.

If this was the story the comments in this thread would have been very different.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#96

Post by makomk »

evol262 wrote: post #77
traverseda wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When his employer uses politics to try to coerce others into using that "free & gratis" software it can leave a bit of a bitter taste in your mouth. It's not that something like pulseaudio is bad so we can just ignore it, it's that pulseaudio is bad because because redhat funds a lot of gnome stuff gnome won't really work unless you use pulseaudio, and since you use gnome you now have to use systemd. If pulseaudio ju…

Desktop Linux is not Red Hat's core business and it hasn't been for a long, long time. Way before pulse or systemd. This is, fundamentally, a gross misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the way that open source works in general, and of the way Red Hat-employed developers in particular interacted with the ecosystem. I was in the engineering side in various positions for nearly a decade. The policy was upstream firs…

The "upstream first" way that Red Hat-employed developers worked mostly seemed to involve pushing all the buggy bleeding-edge stuff upstream so that they didn't have to deal with rebasing it, whilst keeping the work of cherry picking the parts that were actually functional and resulted in a working system as Red Hat's proprietary edge. I've had to pull important PulseAudio bugfixes out of Fedora packages before now because they literally did not exist in the upstream version, and their stable Linux kernel patches - an area they actually make money off, unlike desktop Linux - are effectively proprietary, with customers not allowed to reveal what's in their patchset and co-operation with the upstream stable releases that everyone else uses basically non-existent.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#97

Post by evol262 »

ElectricalUnion wrote: post #86
tristan957 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

systemd-homed is not systemd.

This whole Lennart Poettering thing of naming and bundling otherwise completely independent pieces of software "systemd-${thing}" even when they are at best just sightly related to "things you might want managed for you in your computer" doesn't make a lot of sense, and doesn't help in his defense that "systemd is supposed to be modular". My guess is that if PulseAudio had came later, it would be called "systemd-audi…

Things which talk to the systemd dbus endpoints to add/stop/create/manipulate units are systemd-blahblah. This isn't that confusing.

If it dynamically creates systemd units or sets their properties (systemd-homed, systemd-networkd, systemd-resolved) using the dbus endpoints, it's systemd-something.

If it uses systemd libraries and lives in the systemd repo because it shares baseline docde, it's systemd-something.

systemd is modular in the sense that those components are build-time flags. For homed, for example: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/meson_options.t...

Again, not confusing. Literally looking at the systemd repo for longer than 30 seconds would show you both why this it's considered modular, and why it's systemd-whatever

Pulse doesn't.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#98

Post by ElectricalUnion »

mnd999 wrote: post #64

I reckon he’s a lot less employable than he thinks he is.

Even assuming a non-controversial person, it's very hard to find a corporation willing to employ a dedicated, fully commited to upstream, foss, Linux Desktop experience developer.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#99

Post by traverseda »

evol262 wrote: post #77
traverseda wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When his employer uses politics to try to coerce others into using that "free & gratis" software it can leave a bit of a bitter taste in your mouth. It's not that something like pulseaudio is bad so we can just ignore it, it's that pulseaudio is bad because because redhat funds a lot of gnome stuff gnome won't really work unless you use pulseaudio, and since you use gnome you now have to use systemd. If pulseaudio ju…

Desktop Linux is not Red Hat's core business and it hasn't been for a long, long time. Way before pulse or systemd. This is, fundamentally, a gross misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the way that open source works in general, and of the way Red Hat-employed developers in particular interacted with the ecosystem. I was in the engineering side in various positions for nearly a decade. The policy was upstream firs…

> Desktop Linux is not Red Hat's core business and it hasn't been for a long,

>It is getting paid to help companies make Linux work for them

There's an obvious joke there :p

But I think it's reasonably clear that I wasn't saying they were trying to build a moat around desktop linux, but around those enterprise offerings. One part of that is making their init system the defacto standard.

>The only reason why there's a perception that "non-Red Hat stakeholders didn't matter" is because the vast majority of community users weren't submitting patches

I don't think I can get into it without being rude, but I think that hasn't born out history. If an outsider does submit patches to scratch their own itch they can expect to at best be held to a much higher standard and at worst be treated quite rudely. I recognize that that's going to be subjective but there's definitely some bad blood between gnome and many third parties. Look at lxqt/lxde, appindicators, etc.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#100

Post by atoav »

deathanatos wrote: post #85
zerocrates wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also using and happy with Pipewire but I can't remember the last time I had a PulseAudio issue, across many systems. 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…

Yeah, same; I can't help but think there is a vocal minority in these threads that thinks Pulse is broken. I use Pulse for some pretty complicated stuff, too; I'll pipe individual streams to my speakers, if I want to show something to my SO (e.g., a reddit video) but want to keep, like, my music or my backgrounded game on the headset. I can do that with PA, and honestly pretty easily. AFAIK, no other system supports…

Ever used a soundcard with more than two inputs and more than two outputs? Or better: that soundcard while also outputing audio via HDMI?

PA is ok if you use consumer software for consumer tasks. As soon as you go into the production side of things (or even do it live and/or for money) things can fall appart pretty quickly.

The vocal PA critics I know don't even complain about the way pulseaudio does things. They complain about the persistent problems this widely deployed piece of software still has after years in the field. And some of those problems are of conceptual nature.

I don't Pöttering really deserves the heat he gets (no dev would), but I sometimes wish that type of (usually male) programmer would just sometimes stay with the trouble and not ride of into the sunshine when things aren't a beautiful fresh sheet of white paper anymore, but a tangled mess.

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