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Linux is not about choice (2008)

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Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#61

Post by VLM »

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.

Thats a distro problem not a "linux kernel" problem.

Linux doesn't have too many problems with multiple choices. Historically I've seen a couple situations where multiple kernel drivers target the same hardware, but this usually shakes out pretty quickly. Arguably some of the weirder filesystems shipped with the kernel have not quite been enterprise grade. But overall the kernel has high standards.

Coincidentally Debian just released another stable last weekend and the short version is if the maintainer(s) package doesn't play well with others, the package gets yanked (via a release critical bug, which means either you fix it soon or the package gets removed from the release). So either it cooperates with the rest of the system, or its not part of the system anymore.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#62

Post by 10098 »

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 on Linux wasn't a problem 5 years ago. In fact, it wasn't a problem even earlier. I started using linux on a regular basis circa 2006 and never ran into any problems with sound. I used different distros (knoppix, ASPLinux, openSUSE, ubuntu, linux mint, arch) on different desktop machines and laptops. The worst problem I had was with winmodems that refused to work with anything but windows, but even that I was able to solve by installing some weird drivers.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#63

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#64

Post by VLM »

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.

Offline and completely alone I agree, you'd have to try stuff and see what you like. Which is not awful given a decent package management system.

Of course in the modern connected world, you use what your friend showed you, or google, or youtube, or some blog page. screencasts, and tutorials, and faqs. I've never considered the free software community to have a shortage of opinionated highly vocal people.

Someone turned me onto the Awesome window manager, don't remember who or where. Probably 20 years ago I mostly used emacs but the smartest engineer I worked with used vi, so peer pressure struck. I learned GIT from a text blog tutorial quite a few years ago. I watched a screencast on Arduino IDE installation (which was embarrassingly simple and worked perfectly)

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#65

Post by papsosouid »

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…

>though if I'm not mistaken it's still the preferred solution for BSD and therefore often available as an option

I believe you are mistaken. The BSDs have always avoided all the freakish audio framework nonsense from linux land. They provide an API that is somewhat compatible with OSS to allow software with linuxisms like assuming OSS to function. That API is a wrapper around the real audio system: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=ossaudio&ap...

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#66

Post by GhotiFish »

Yup, no one could disagree with this sentiment. Nuke old useless features, if you have new better ways of doing things, and they actually are better, that's awesome. Do that

As long as you actually DO have a better way to do things.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#67

Post by simonh »

VLM wrote: post #50
dman wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

>A window manager should manage windows not sound

Here in the real world a desktop environment like Unity is a whoe lot more than just a window manager. It includes system management and configuration GUI components, including preferences panes and utilities to control audio functions. Unity is trying to provide a comprehensive user interface to the entire OS, or as much of it as possible.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#68

Post by pyre »

pmahoney wrote: post #47
gue5t wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

FYI on killing PulseAudio:

* Turning off auto-respawn (from 2010, not sure if it's entirely accurate): http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/7130/2

* Script I used to use to get Skype and PulseAudio to play nice in the early days of PA: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=790889

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#69

Post by tomrod »

klodolph wrote: post #14
mpyne wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

I don't mean to threadjack. I'm curious what apps you've put out. I'm a sound neophyte, occasionally play with Audacity, but interested in doing more advanced stuff. I just wanted to point out that I'd love to see any technical blogs/howtos you may have put together, or any top notch stuff you may have come across.

Thanks!

/threadjack

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#70

Post by yebyen »

aerique wrote: post #54
gue5t wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a non-professional, I use a non-realtime JACK as the new ESD. I prefer that over the incomprehensible monster that PulseAudio is. My needs are simple: I want sound from my audio player (MOC), from my browser (f.e. Youtube), from games and they shouldn't interfere. So my audio player shouldn't have exclusive access to the device and prevent me from hearing Youtube at the same time. JACK does all this, is easy to co…

Is there still debian testing, or are you calling 'wheezy' as testing? Just wondering

I thought the way it was supposed to work was, when testing gets re-tagged as stable, there's no 'testing' for a brief period (month?) until the next planned distro release is named.

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