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Linux is not about choice (2008)

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Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#21

Post by kfk »

ctdonath wrote: post #18
rayiner wrote: post #2

Epic: "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…

No, sound is not a problem on Linux. I wonder if it ever was actually.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#22

Post by rayiner »

kfk wrote: post #21
ctdonath wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, sound is not a problem on Linux. I wonder if it ever was actually.

It's always been a morass of competing, incompatible sound servers and APIs. Coding up anything more trivial than "beep" that works on a wide variety of distributions is painful.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#23

Post by ctdonath »

jacquesm wrote: post #5

OS: the huge pile of code that you need to get process abstraction, a file system, networking and possibly some human interface stuff up and running. Code best not seen nor heard because that means you're not doing what you should be doing: using applications or writing them. OS software is a commodity, and with portability being Linux' mainstay it can now be found on processors of almost any pedigree. Linux is all a…

It's not the proliferation of choices that's the problem, its that so many of those choices don't work.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#24

Post by mwfunk »

plutr wrote: post #16
cag_ii wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it's getting upvoted, then by definition it's interesting to people. It's not new but it's still relevant, and having a discussion about it on HN 5 years later is certainly new, which was probably the intent.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#25

Post by scott_s »

plutr wrote: post #16
cag_ii wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then we must conclude that "Hacker News" is not strictly a "news" site.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#26

Post by npsimons »

ctdonath wrote: post #18
rayiner wrote: post #2

Epic: "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…

Linux sound hasn't been a problem for some of us for, oh, I don't know, well over 10 years (1999? 1998? I can't remember), and no, I'm not talking about "well I can write sound drivers, therefore it works for me, har har har!" I've never quite understood the problems people had, since I've always had Linux sound "just work" for me out of the box. Sure, back in the ISA bus days, you had to specify things like IRQs, but you had to do that on any OS where you had cards with hardware jumperable IRQs.

Pulseaudio, I thankfully didn't have to deal with until it was actually working, but it still struck me as very much an NIH solution in search of a problem. I still remember the Enlightened Sound Daemon with software mixing, and thought it was nifty, but not a hard requirement.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#27

Post by gue5t »

ctdonath wrote: post #18
rayiner wrote: post #2

Epic: "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…

It really isn't. Unless you have a card without a driver (exceedingly rare, though it's not uncommon to need a recent kernel to use recent hardware) ALSA pretty much Just Works. For complex features like streaming sound over the network you need PulseAudio, which due to its complexity takes more configuration and setup, but that's done out of the box on a fair number of distros. I don't know of any major software that requires OSS (though if I'm not mistaken it's still the preferred solution for BSD and therefore often available as an option), and only professional software uses JACK; users of JACK generally buy high-end hardware specifically for that purpose and know what they're doing.

So there are three major components for different purposes. Core audio support is the domain of ALSA itself and Linux does a good job with it. PulseAudio provides advanced capabilities on top of the more basic/hardware-oriented functionality in ALSA, and JACK provides low-latency audio for realtime applications that need it (not games, only really audio processing equipment). With large amounts of work the partial redundancy between these components could be removed, but it's really not a big issue; for desktop or professional use getting things to work right isn't too hard.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#28

Post by dscrd »

kfk wrote: post #21
ctdonath wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, sound is not a problem on Linux. I wonder if it ever was actually.

It was a problem until Pulseaudio became good -- to my experience, that happened around the 2.0 release. And in a technical sense, it's still a problem, since ALSA contains so much useless complexity now that something like PA finally exists.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#29

Post by roc »

ctdonath wrote: post #23
jacquesm wrote: post #5

OS: the huge pile of code that you need to get process abstraction, a file system, networking and possibly some human interface stuff up and running. Code best not seen nor heard because that means you're not doing what you should be doing: using applications or writing them. OS software is a commodity, and with portability being Linux' mainstay it can now be found on processors of almost any pedigree. Linux is all a…

It's not the proliferation of choices that's the problem, its that so many of those choices don't work.

And there's so little information available/presented to the person who has to make that choice, as to which ones do work, or which ones they should even want to work.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#30

Post by yew »

ctdonath wrote: post #18
rayiner wrote: post #2

Epic: "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…

Sound isn't a problem for me. I just use ALSA and everything works (I haven't edited a single configuration file, actually).

The sound-server wars are still ongoing but I've personally never had any cause to touch anything besides ALSA or OpenAL/SDL on the development side either. Other people may have different experiences.

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