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Linux is not about choice (2008)

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Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#41

Post by danielweber »

roc wrote: post #29
ctdonath wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You might find some old mailing list that says "oh, you need to grgab version 1.2.3 of package_thing"

But version 1.2.3 of package_thing was obsolete 3 years ago, and the latest version requires you to update your glibc.

I upgrade Linux buying a new system and copying what I want to the new hardware.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#42

Post by cpleppert »

roc wrote: post #29
ctdonath wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you mean there isn't anything magical about Linux and it isn't the embodiment of "Freedom and Choice" and every piece of software that runs on it must be carefully designed to integrate with other software packages? I'm about to faint!

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#43

Post by ChuckMcM »

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…

The new challenge in the embedded community is device tree apparently. Lots of gripes about arbitrarily changing something that worked. Printing continues to be painful, as does direct to framebuffer graphics.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#44

Post by danielweber »

dman wrote: post #38
danielweber wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, sound is still a problem. I tried to change window managers on My Ubuntu desktop and totally lost sound. I am well past the age of my life where there is anything productive about spending hours of my day futzing with sound drivers. I know how drivers work. I'm not becoming any better at working with computers by deciphering this year's way of sound not working with Linux. (It did work out of the box. I was gett…

"I tried to change window managers on My Ubuntu desktop and totally lost sound." - Once you do something as drastic as changing the default window manager on a distro you are largely on your own. In the past switching window managers would leave you without a network connection because Network Manager applet would begin after you login into gnome. However this appears to be fixed and was not an issue the last few tim…

Then all the answers about "Unity isn't so bad, because you can switch away from it" become void.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#45

Post by VLM »

rlu wrote: post #33
kfk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have a netbook running xubuntu and when I connect it to a TV via HDMI, the sound continues to come from the netbook rather than from the TV. I googled for some fixes and couldn't find any quick fix that worked. This should "just work" in my opinion. It does in Windows and I'm sure OSX makes it just as painless.

What does "just work" mean? I have a mythtv frontend that squirts its video out a HDMI and audio out of a optical fiber to the surround sound system. It would drive me crazy if sound came out of the horrible TV speakers instead of the surround sound system.

Two separate problems:

1) Default behavior where no change is the least surprising so at least that is OK.

2) Modify config where its obviously a fail if you can't figure out how to change the config.

For whatever its worth, if you use ALSA, mythtv is ALSA compatible, so I merely go into "config" "audio" and mess around with audio options to my hearts content.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#46

Post by es20641 »

I don't really follow this argument.

"... because there are so many kinds of cars you can buy that cars are about choice."

The "Choice" part of Linux doesn't come into play so much when you are "shopping for a distro", it's the fact that if there is something you don't like the spoiler on your distro, you can switch to another. Heck, you can even build the distro from the ground up and choose EVERYTHING in it.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#47

Post by pmahoney »

gue5t wrote: post #27
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…

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 tha…

I actually find PulseAudio vs. JACK incredibly annoying. I like to play around with "professional" audio. I don't consider it professional, but more relevantly I like to play with certain apps that require JACK.

It's certainly an RTFM thing, but last time I didn't know how to get PulseAudio to go away. I wrote a shell script to keep killing it in a loop (since it restarts itself) long enough to get JACK to take over. I know there must be better ways...

Then inevitably once I've got JACK setup, I'll want to play some background music or watch some Flash video online without tearing down my JACK setup. Oops, does that audio player support JACK natively? Do I have that plugin installed? Can I run Pulse and have it direct output into JACK? None of this has worked smoothly in my experience.

> users of JACK generally buy high-end hardware specifically for that purpose and know what they're doing

This has not been my experience. I love to dabble, but apparently don't know what I'm doing.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#48

Post by glesica »

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 is already winning the OS wars, it's called Android ;-) Just being snarky, I get your point. I've said this before, and I think it is important to keep in mind when discussing GNU/Linux: things work quite well... on supported hardware.

The vast majority of tales of woe related to GNU/Linux and hardware end up coming down to incompatible hardware. This is a communication problem, not a technical problem. No one gets upset that OS X won't run on a random Acer netbook from 4 years ago because Apple has made clear that their OS is only supposed to work on their hardware.

GNU/Linux evangelists, on the other hand, have, in the past especially, had a tendency to sell their operating system as magical software that works on every machine always. This is, of course, totally false. When I buy a laptop I check several sources (including the Ubuntu Certified list) to make sure the machine I end up with will be fully supported, preferably with open drivers.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#49

Post by teeja »

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 setup bad? Not compared to 5 or 10 years ago, no. During that period (I can guarantee!) both Win and OSX were ALSO -miserable- experiences. Swim 10 yards, gain a foot bad. Make music for 5 minutes, debug the system for 2 hours bad.

Hmmph. Kids nowadays.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#50

Post by VLM »

dman wrote: post #38
danielweber wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, sound is still a problem. I tried to change window managers on My Ubuntu desktop and totally lost sound. I am well past the age of my life where there is anything productive about spending hours of my day futzing with sound drivers. I know how drivers work. I'm not becoming any better at working with computers by deciphering this year's way of sound not working with Linux. (It did work out of the box. I was gett…

"I tried to change window managers on My Ubuntu desktop and totally lost sound." - Once you do something as drastic as changing the default window manager on a distro you are largely on your own. In the past switching window managers would leave you without a network connection because Network Manager applet would begin after you login into gnome. However this appears to be fixed and was not an issue the last few tim…

Thats a huge failure of abstraction. File a bug. A window manager should manage windows not sound. Someone outside the linux community would have no idea that the thing that controls title bars also happens to control sound.

On Debian with ratpoison / awesome / KDE / probably others it "just works" and you don't control your sound with your window or whatever.

It would be like configuring your mouse by modifying your network settings or configuring your video card by modifying your joystick/gamepad settings.

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