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

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171–180 of 193 posts

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

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't know what point you're trying to make though. To me this is like if you said "in a hypothetical sense planes are fine because you can buy a private jet, but in practice it's a pain because you know I have to fly in a crowded coach seat". Like, ok, sure, that's technically true, but still no one is going to donate you a private jet. If you had another hypothetical replacement and you could afford to spen…

To quote myself: > Between Red Hat's maneuvering and Poettering's choices, though, it's not trivial to avoid them. I'm just explaining why some people dislike Poettering's work, while typically having no strong opinions about the careers of every single other author of init and sound daemons, whether or not they like the software. It's a combo of 1) disagreeing with their choices and methods, and 2) the fact that tho…

But these things are inherent to the problem domain.

Sure, noone will be as angry at a Paint-clone’s maintainer because, well just use something else. But it is not trivial in case of non-trivial problems like booting and audio, both requiring some standard IPC communication besides the inherent complexity of the program itself.

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

#172
post #82
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?

Because there is no other* that actually works properly to even get half as popular?

* there is now pipewire which will hopefully overtake pulseaudio though

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

#173
post #172
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because there is no other* that actually works properly to even get half as popular? * there is now pipewire which will hopefully overtake pulseaudio though

There were popular audio daemons before PulseAudio took over, though. It's not like it entered a completely empty "market", if you will. Nobody was mad at the authors of those, even though in fact they did also suck. Nobody seems upset over Pipewire.

So I don't think you've found the reason.

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

#174
post #20

Earlier 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…

Ubuntu's adoption of it was what pushed me away from Desktop Linux, after about a decade of being mainly a Linux user. Suddenly the one thing that had actually Just Worked for almost that entire decade, became unstable, unpredictable, and, to add insult to injury, ate tons of memory and processor cycles for unclear and likely unjustifiable reasons.

I’m sorry but I really can’t take any such take seriously. If you mean alsa, it may have worked (though let’s be honest, there was a painstakingly high amount of sound hardware that simply wasn’t supported well for decades, which was fixed over a similar timeline. “Linux sound bad” memes have been around way before PA became a thing), but the thing is, it is not adequate in itself for a typical desktop usecase, simple as that.

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

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Frankly, no, it was not, or I wouldn't have written that. Those "enterprise offerings" have zero interaction with Pulse outside of some edge cases in SPICE for VDI. Th…

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…

>the graying of gnome

They broke their own user -> developer pipeline through years of deliberately alienating power users.

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

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Have never used those APIs, but I would assume it'd happen if drivers fail to implement basic API promises and PulseAudio doesn't code defensively against those kind of bugs.

> PulseAudio doesn't code defensively against those kind of bugs.

That's a reoccurring pattern across Lennart software. He gets an idea of the way things should work, maybe from the spec or maybe just from his own subjective biases, and has his software expect things to work that way and fail when it doesn't. Every time, he'll say it's the other guys fault. Sometimes his software even fails unsafe and he still blames everybody else.

The '0day' username bug in systemd exemplifies this. Lennart decided that usernames beginning with numbers weren't valid, even though Linux permits it. Systemd was found to run service files with User=0day specified as root instead, not as the user 0day. To Lennart this was not a bug because in his subjective opinion the rest of the system was in error for permitting a username beginning with a number. Even if he were right that usernames beginning with numbers shouldn't be valid, the mere fact that they can occur is reason enough to code defensively around it. At the very least systemd could fail safe when it encounters such an 'invalid' username. But no, he thought there was nothing wrong with failing-to-root. It was everybody else's fault, of course.

https://lwn.net/Articles/727490/

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237#issuecomment-...

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

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you by chance checked the bug tracker, or reported this bug, or attempted to do any debugging to find the root cause?

That would required the "bug" to exist in the first place.

No post body was provided.

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you by chance checked the bug tracker, or reported this bug, or attempted to do any debugging to find the root cause?

"Why didn't you just become a pulseaudio dev if you hate pulseaudio so much"

Get fucking real, I have better things to do with my life than waste time ingratiating myself with the likes of pusleaudio devs. "Audio stopped working" describes hundreds if not thousands of pulseaudio bugs, do you really expect frustrated end users to drop everything else going on in their life and spend weeks learning the ropes of this shit? Get real.

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Okay, I have two computers on my LAN right now, one running OpenSUSE with KDE and Pulseaudio, the other with Debian and Pulseaudio. I want to send my audio from the OpenSUSE computer to the Debian computer. What do I drag, and to where? There's nothing dragable in my systray that even mentions the Debian computer.

I'm quite sure this process starts with me writing some config files on both of these computers. That's how it worked every other time I've tried these sort of things with Pulseaudio. These sort of tricks are possible for techies to do with Pulseaudio, but for the proverbial grandmother user they may as well not exist because the system as a whole certainly isn't going to make it easy.

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

#180
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 d…

> Oh dear.. I'm not going to comment on that. I don't think it's productive.

It's simple: Don't tell other people what they did or didn't experience. If you don't understand that, then you aren't worth talking to.

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