Why is this old stuff from 2008 being posted and upvoted?
Cause Greg K-H posted it on Google+ today...
Linux is not about choice (2008)
11–20 of 238 posts
Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)
#12>> If you try to deliver both at once you have to also deliver a way of switching between the two.
I would argue instead that Linux is about freedom. In other words, rather than expecting my distro to go out of its way to provide multiple choices and a way of switching between those choices, I expect it to not go out of its way to prevent me from switching if I chooose to, even if switching is difficult, and even if it needs to warn me that what I'm about to do is a bad idea.
Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)
#13Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)
#14Why is this old stuff from 2008 being posted and upvoted?
It's as right now as it was 5 years ago, and has a lot of corrolary with other customer-facing, resource-constrained software maintenance environments that you might see from a YC participant. And I say this as a Linux user who doesn't use PulseAudio...
As a user who avoided Pulse for years, I feel your pain. But since I started writing audio apps for Linux, I realized that the Pulse Audio API is the least broken way to do audio on Linux. It is very comparable to Core Audio and DirectSound in terms of the most relevant features. ALSA should just give hardware access but instead it is bloated with plugins and tries to do everything.
There's really no excuse for not doing mixing and sample rate conversion in userspace (not all hardware can do it) and an audio server just makes more sense than plugins for client applications.
Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)
#15Why is this old stuff from 2008 being posted and upvoted?
People are upvoting it. Therefore it is relevant.
Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)
#16Why is this old stuff from 2008 being posted and upvoted?
If just as relevant today as it was then, why shouldn't it be?
Because the point of a news site is to deliver information that is both new and interesting to the reader.
If something is from 5 years ago, it is drastically more likely that the reader either knows it already or is not interested, as opposed to things that are, say, less than a month old.
Especially if that information was reposted constantly, as that logic would allow.
Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)
#17I'm not sure what this thread is about frankly.
It reeks of "ooh, linux is great because its !somethingelse" that used to pervade academia and a lot of the industry. Frankly that still pervades but there's finally more substance behind "Linux" as a whole. For a lot of newbies "Linux" was their first experience with a unix-like system, so they either loved it or were made to use it and became familiar with it. Thats not particularly a bad thing but it results in this rampant fanboyism thats kinda annoying to someone who was using other systems beforehand.
So yeah, you get "choice" with Linux, but you get it with a bunch of other operating systems too, you just have to do a different amount of work. There are plenty of things that are not easier in Linux, but really its all about tradeoffs.
Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)
#18Epic: "But the chain of logic from 'Linux is about choice' to 'ship everything and let the user chose how they want their sound to not work' starts with fallacy and ends with disaster."
Is sound still a problem on Linux? I realize the article is about 5 years old, but Linux has been around for a long time now, and sound is a really basic function I'd expect even obtuse geeks would want to solve. If it is still a problem, seems that's a definitive concise example of why Linux can't win the OS wars: some things must work, even if nobody wants the task of making it work; sometimes the only solution is to pay someone to do what nobody else wants to.
ETA: Seems the answer is "yes".
Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)
#19Big distros don't use Linux how Linux developers use Linux. The guys that write Linux software always have the latest version and test against them. Once I switched to Gentoo I have a rock solid system with the latest and greatest software packages. Every week I update all my software and my laptop has been running on the same install for 2 years, with Ubuntu some random nonsense would fail every 6 months and with SUSE you would be using GCC from the stone age.
Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)
#20I don't think Linux is about anything (and that includes intangibles like "choice" or "freedom"). It's an open source kernel that a bunch of people hack on, that's it. The traditional Linux distro model is about choice, but that was from necessity, not design.
Android and Ubuntu and others have shown that there's a whole spectrum of OS's with varying degrees of specific design and policy that you can build on top of the Linux kernel and specific pieces of the traditional Linux userland stack.
I don't think any one of these things is the right way to do a Linux-based system, I just see all of that software as the primordial ooze that various OS's arise out of.
There was a local minimum in the late '90s and early 2000s in which most of the distros were trying to do the same thing in different ways and remain more or less compatible with each other, but these days there's a lot more willingness to actually try to design complete systems, which include things like UI policies and standard libraries that limit their compatibility with other systems. I think this is great- the traditional distro model is still going strong via Debian and Slackware and so on, but I'm glad that people are thinking about Linux in new and more specific ways as well.
(EDIT: typo)