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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

#151

Post by esarbe »

corrral wrote: post #81
esarbe wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is forced to use it - you can always switch distro. I also use hyperbole as a rhetoric instrument but in text seldom works.

At work you may not have that choice, especially since all the most-used (so, best supported) distros are deep into systemd now, or if you have a distro that you otherwise like but that has switched to systemd. It's possible to prefer something over alternatives but still think it's worse than it used to be, or could be better, or to very much dislike one part of it. Again, much like Windows and other MS products. Pe…

> At work you may not have that choice,

If you cannot switch the distro, then you deal with it. That's the tyranny of not using Linux-From-Scratch. But that's always been the case; the distro maintainer make the decision what to package and what not. It's not different with the service manager systemd.

> since all the most-used (so, best supported) distros are deep into systemd

Ever wondered why? Because it is vastly more simple an implementation target than writing bash scripts. It's more easily tested in isolation and the documentation is outstanding.

> no-one is upset with any other init system

Oh, I remember the heat and hate that Ubuntu got when they switched to Upstart. The reason that systemd gets all the rage is because it is the largest target with the most innovation. People always get mad when things change. People *hate* change.

> or audio daemon creators

Pulseaudio had to plow the way and thus got all the heat for exposing tons of bugs in the alsa kernel drivers. And what else is there besides pulseaudio? PipeWire? This is the successor to pulseaudio, the next iteration.

> Something different happened with these projects.

Which is...?

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

#152

Post by pydry »

evol262 wrote: post #101
pydry wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

RHEL6 used upstart also. I had to write/maintain upstart files, too. systemd picked up steam inside Red Hat because of the number of edge cases upstart DID NOT handle. It didn't do socket based activation at all. It didn't handle day 2 operations well (if you changed the configuration of some parent service and the children needed to be restarted, this was just as manual as sysvinit but with a clunkier format). overr…

>It didn't do socket based activation at all.

Pretty sure it did actually.

>upstart's weird middleground of a "script" verb

What middleground? Upstart files werent scripts like sysvvinit they were declarative just like systemd.

I can see why red hat dumped it - they were clearly keen on "owning" PID 1 and would prefer not to depend upon ubuntus project.

It's the 7/8 person debian vote (split 50/50 and swung by one vote) that I found mystifying. It not only crowned a worse designed project burdened with a massive case of feature creep, that was weirdly unresponsive to bugs it killed off its competition.

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

#153

Post by sam_lowry_ »

ElectricalUnion wrote: post #104
zozbot234 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These "simple" use cases break when you need to do anything even slightly more complex than whatever the sysvinit scripts you copied envisioned. FTFY systemd might be sad but makes the simple case simple. sysvinit makes everything complex and error prone.

sysvinit could be debugged, at least. I tried to debug a couple of systemd edge cases with Pottering, communicating over Github Issues, but he lost interest very quickly.

To his, credit he is reactive until he decides the issue is not worth his time.

To his discredit, he made himself into a giant bottleneck. Random systemd users can not easily understand it.

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

#154

Post by sam_lowry_ »

int_19h wrote: post #80
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miguel criticized MS recently so this path might be closed for him.

Miguel de Icaza left Microsoft in March, 2022.

Ok, so they hired Lennaert as replacement, finally!

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

corrral wrote: post #82
esarbe wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So why's no-one mad at any other init or audio daemon authors? Poettering just had bad luck?

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by esarbe »

makomk wrote: post #90
esarbe wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Enabling software audio mixing with ALSA required copying and pasting a small handful of lines into your ALSA config file and just worked. Most of PulseAudio's hardware problems were caused by it having weird and unnecessary expectations, like wanting to know the exact sample being played by the hardware or expecting analog volume controls to have perfectly accurate gain and glitch-free volume changes. PulseAudio als…

> expecting analog volume controls to have perfectly accurate gain and glitch-free volume changes.

Why would it be weird or unnecessary to expect that?

Besides; that's a nice anecdote! Thanks for sharing!

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

#157

Post by esarbe »

gnulinux wrote: post #148
esarbe wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is factually false in my case since ALSA alone has always been fine, no issues. And since I switched (with the same hardware) pipewire also works just fine. But pulseaudio (pa+alsa ofc) is just simply broken on my archlinux install. EDIT: also when pulseaudio breaks you just do `pulseaudio --kill ; pulseaudio --start` Does this really reset the hardware/firmware? I doubt it; it's just configured poorly for my ha…

> Does this really reset the hardware/firmware?

No, but it can release resources and that in turn can cause the driver to reset in part.

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

#158

Post by mschuster91 »

zh3 wrote: post #70
mschuster91 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea that is because anything Realtek is an utterly brain-dead piece of crap and "quirks", and that on Windows . On Linux it's even more pain, mostly because OEMs don't bother to release the specific quirks their specialized Windows driver fork had applied. Don't even want to know how many Windows systems ship with outdated, possibly insecure Realtek drivers because the OEM long since stopped backporting fixes.

I appreciate that Realtek can be an issue, but on a few PCs they works solidly with Alsa so seems unlikely it's the kernel driver (restarting pulseaudio would bring it back, at least for a while). So it seems to me the issues are very much with Pulseaudio (rather than with the kernel).

Alternatively, Pulseaudio could be exercising different code paths in Realtek's firmware that Alsa doesn't trigger. With Realtek, all bets are open...

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

#159

Post by traverseda »

Crysstalis wrote: post #146
traverseda wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>I can point to multiple specific instances where gnome developers were rude, unhelpful, arrogant, etc I too can point to multiple specific instances where Linux developers were rude, or where gcc developers were rude, or where SDL developers were rude, or where a lot of other developers were rude. I bet someone could dig through your comment history and find instances where you were rude and unhelpful too, probably…

>This always seems to happen and it's always from the same suspects trying to revive the same old >=10 year old forum threads.

I think that has something to do with redhat defenders/employees needing to nitpick every little issue that anyone has in a public forum. The inability to just say "oh well that's bad but we're working on it" and instead try to mitigate or distract from any legitimate issues. Any discussion about this issues always turns into the same sprawling discussion where I'm asked to prove a bunch of subjective things. I try to illustrate that third parties have issues with redhat engineers and submitting patches. I back that up by showing that the developers of lxde, transmission, and SDL, have all had significant issues with the gnome development team (mostly redhat), and I'm told it's creepy to point that out. But those are some of the cases that gave redhat this reputation.

You can't have a negative opinion about redhat/gnome without a bunch of people crawling out of the woodwork to nitpick and force you to justify every negative opinion to absurd amounts. Most of those people aren't just regular users, they are or were directly involved with redhad or gnome. It's impossible to have a straightforward debate, it will get derailed into a bunch of minutia.

My main complaint is that redhat encourages tighter coupling between their components that I think is reasonable, that's what I said in the root comment and I stand by it. The fact that I'm not debating a bunch of minutia with a bunch of redhat fandboys is frankly endemic to the problem.

Tell me, have you been paid to work on systemd/gnome/redhat in the past?

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

#160

Post by seba_dos1 »

robonerd wrote: post #18
kyruzic wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> Have fun routing audio from one stream to one device and another stream to a different device on Windows or macos! I can do that with pulseaudio, but it's not fun.

I use to do that quite often with Pulse, and on Plasma it's just a matter of drag'n'drop in audio systray applet.
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