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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

#131

Post by eternityforest »

corrral wrote: post #122
eternityforest wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any real evidence people hate their work. Some people do, but it's not like, an overflowing toilet or wet socks that almost everyone hates. I personally wouldn't touch a non-systemd system if I didn't have to. The thing they did to piss people off was breaking with UNIX tradition and not prioritizing simplicity. This makes them hated by enthusiasts, tinkerers, people who don't trust tech, etc, and loved o…

I'm actually strongly in favor of someone coming in and replacing a bunch of the bike-shedding horseshit in Linux with some "no, it's this way, period, live with it" if only to make distributing software for Linux less crazy-making. I just think Poettering's (and, more generally, Red Hat's) taste is really bad, so I wish it weren't him(/them). Possibly when they finally achieve Systemd/Linux and the entire stack atop…

Ubuntu is wonderful as long as they don't do a anything new, and you're using a derivative not raw Ubuntu.

I'm actually not even fully sure on the details what they even do that isn't in Debian aside from maybe some driver stuff and assorted annoyances like Snaps. I just know to stick with Ubuntu derivatives because almost all large popular apps seem to be well tested and designed to work on it, until the community gets tired of it and probably Fedora or something takes over.

It's the perfect example of "I'd rather have a mediocre standard than something excellent but obscure".

I'm not a fan of Pulse, because of its lack of low latency, although It still offers a lot over raw ALSA, and PipeWire solves basically all of it's issues.

But systemd is a lot more comprehensive, it doesn't seem to leave any use cases out, aside from ultralight embedded and old school "Control everything yourself with imperative scripting" style setups.

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

#132

Post by m0llusk »

Ugh, this thread! For years I pleaded with people to understand that there was value to being able to start up in a deterministic manner, but some shell scripts that don't actually work are supposed to be enough? Then someone finally solves the problem and it is written off as some kind of weird corporate control move. And people could still come up with some kind of alternative, but the open source movement that solved problems for people has been replaced by a hostile cargo cult.

At least I get to use systemd not just for reliable start up but also controlling the services that so many applications are made of nowadays. But it feels like some terrible Balkan conflict that just won't simmer down.

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

#133

Post by traverseda »

evol262 wrote: post #124
traverseda wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we're going to reach and real agreements here, a lot of these things are going to be subjective. I think there's a certain amount of "if everyone around you is an asshole maybe you're actually an asshole" but I doubt I'm going to be changing anyone's minds today. That being said there is a bit of hard data, this post nicely shows gnome contributions over time, as less and less non-redhat developer contr…

> I don't think we're going to reach and real agreements here, a lot of these things are going to be subjective. I think there's a certain amount of "if everyone around you is an asshole maybe you're actually an asshole" but I doubt I'm going to be changing anyone's minds today. I don't think we'll reach any real agreements either, but I also don't think it's all that subjective. We could say my perspective is skewed…

>Try not to turn people into strawmen.

As an aside, part of my frustration with talking to you is that specific problem. You're very early to dismiss complaints with things like

> (me) 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.

>> (you) This perception also grossly misrepresents or misunderstands open source.

Now I can point to at least a few instances of that happening, but I know from experience that the goalposts will likely move again. I can point to a well respected SDL developer saying "this architecture is not how anything else works and will cause significant issues for the SDL project, and therefor many games on linux" and a gnome developer saying "Fix the applications and libraries that claim the support Wayland, but don't do it properly.". Now even if they were right on a technical level (they weren't) that's no way to talk to your fellow open-source developers who were being very polite and explaining why the proposed architecture wouldn't work.

For that particular issue at some point gnome developers did step back and implement CSD.

But regardless, "this perception also grossly misrepresents or misunderstands open source" is completely out of line and where I decided you weren't worth talking to. I can point to multiple specific instances where gnome developers were rude, unhelpful, arrogant, etc, but I'd rather not drag into that. Like I say it gets insulting very quickly. The simple fact is that their reputation for being assholes is, on the whole, earned. I'm sure there are specific cases where it doesn't happen but assholery seems to be endemic to the entire organization.

If you want specific documentation on times systemd has caused significant issues (not counting the pwnies that are well documented) I've started documenting my experiences here (unpublished, and something that I'm unlikely to ever publish): https://traverseda.github.io/scratchpad/systemd.md.html

Or see this article here: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti...

Or this rather infamous interaction: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685

At some point I suppose I'll get around to documenting the times gnome developers were publicly assholes to other open source contributors, but honestly I'd rather let it go and just ignore the whole project as much as I'm able to.

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

#134

Post by blooalien »

_ofdw wrote: post #45
tpush wrote: post #21

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.

>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. Because he and his orbiters were extraordinarily arrogant and condescending about their software. And let's not forget that while it's pretty good now, in the early days systemd was not very good at all. Because things like GNOME 3 decided to make systemd a hard…

Also because "mean" is the default state of far too much of humanity these days…

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

#135

Post by blooalien »

gnulinux wrote: post #16
alfalfasprout wrote: post #6

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…

PipeWire has been increasingly beneficial to my usage of audio on Linux as time passes as well. Each update seems to fade it a little more into the background so I simply need not worry about it. Audio just does the expected thing for me these days, without fiddling or "hackery" required to make it so. It's also nice no longer having to worry about whether a particular bit of audio software is for Pulse, ALSA, or Jack. They all just work.

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

#136

Post by traverseda »

lamontcg wrote: post #129
evol262 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Things like systemd suffer from the xkcd traffic engineer syndrome: https://xkcd.com/277/ Same thing with cars that were designed in the 1960s before we had to worry about things like emissions and crash safety. Sysvinit is great up until you have a use case that it winds up sucking for. Most people don't hit that problem, or don't realize that their high level problem (correctly handling something being hotswapped p…

OpenRC is pretty good and I think it addressed most of the issues systemd was originally intended to solve. Let's all just use it.

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

#137

Post by alex-robbins »

Does anyone know if Poettering has discovered NixOS yet? I'm reminded of it when I read some of his blog posts like this one [1]. It's hard to describe why, but I feel like he might be able to do a lot with what NixOS offers.

[1]: https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/stateless.html

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

#138

Post by blooalien »

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…

For me Pulse was brutally broken for the longest time. Bit by bit most of the various glitches did get worked out, but the "pain points" of that process did leave me a bit bitter over how Pulse was really kinda "forced" on us long before it was "ready for prime time". Same with systemd, and same with the KDE3⇒KDE4 transition. All pushed too hard for widespread adoption too early in their development, while many of the worst bugs were still commonplace occurrences in daily usage.

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

#139

Post by hakfoo »

corrral wrote: post #67
traverseda wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenRC and alpine are nice.

OpenRC is the only Linux init I've used that I actually enjoyed using, not just could-tolerate.

What was wrong with Slackware's bag full of shell scripts?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what people want an init system for, but I'd expect to need little more than "run these 10 tasks. Potentially, wait for A to finish before starting B". Its job should be over when you see the login prompt.

It feels like modern inits are more like a watchdog/messaging system-- which seems like something which would be an optional add-in atop a real init system.

I want to run a custom utility at power on. It's not a weird expectation. This should take no more than one line of code to achieve, adding "/usr/local/bin/toolname &" to some sort of rc.local file.

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

#140

Post by blooalien »

atoav wrote: post #100
deathanatos wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

While I'm no fan of Pöttering, I can certainly understand wanting to maybe "ride off into the sunshine" when the vast majority of humanity these days is more willing to tear down their fellow humans than they are to suggest or help with any sort of actual solution to any given problem. Makes even trying feel more than a little pointless.
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