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Linux is not about choice (2008)

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Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#71

Post by pyre »

danielweber wrote: post #32
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…

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
What you probably did was switch from a 'desktop environment' to (just) a window manager. A desktop environment includes many processes that are started on login and run in the background (e.g. dbus, pulse-audio, ssh-agent, gpg-agent, gnome-power-manager, etc).

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#72

Post by pyre »

danielweber wrote: post #32
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…

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
What you probably did was switch from a 'desktop environment' to (just) a window manager. A desktop environment includes many processes that are started on login and run in the background (e.g. dbus, pulse-audio, ssh-agent, gpg-agent, gnome-power-manager, etc).

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#73

Post by subway »

yebyen wrote: post #70
aerique wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wheezy was testing until this past Saturday, at which point Wheezy became stable and Jessie was cut as testing.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#74

Post by slacka »

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…

For watching movies or listening to music, the Linux audio system is fine, but ALSA and PulseAudio introduce unacceptable latency for game devs. For example the WINE developers are having major issues with PulseAudio's latency[1]

There are actually 2 low level audio stacks that apps can use in Linux, OSS and ALSA. Only OSS offers great sound and low latency,[2] but the kernel developers have refused to add the free GPL'd OSSv4 updates into the kernel, so we are all stuck with OSSv3 legacy and ALSA's latency and poor design decisions. Using the PA layer only makes the latency situation worse and added another layer for things to go wrong.

[1]http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyO...

[2]http://insanecoding.blogspot.hk/2009/06/state-of-sound-in-li...

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#75

Post by pyre »

npsimons wrote: post #26
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…

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, bu…

I don't know about now, but running Linux on a ThinkPad X41 a couple of years ago with suspend-to-RAM. After a fresh boot a sleep-wake will work twice before the auto switching between speakers and headphones quits. Hibernating and waking will fix it only for one sleep-wake cycle. A full reboot would fix it so that it would work for two more sleep-wake cycles.

I was fully willing to get my hands dirty with a little help (couldn't make heads or tails of the ALSA code), but Ubuntu just decided to shelf it into the 'leave it alone until everyone goes away' bucket on LaunchPad.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#76

Post by ethomson »

glesica wrote: post #53
danielweber wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can switch away from it, you just can't do it with "apt-get install ". Try a distro that is designed for the WM you want to use. I agree that in an ideal world installing a new WM would "Just Work", but we don't live in that world. Try installing a new WM on OS X or Windows and see how well things go. Not trashing those operating systems, just pointing out that GNU/Linux does, indeed, offer more choice. The fact…

You have to be joking me. "A distro that is designed for the WM you want to use"?

What does that even mean? That I have to have a special twm distro? Or an fvwm2 distribution? tvtwm was always my favorite window manager, but I seem to recall it needed some patches to really be perfect. Do I have to find somebody to build me my own distribution that has those patches?

A Window Manager manages windows, like the name suggests; it doesn't manage networking or sound. And if it does, then the whole system has failed to produce decent engineering boundaries and we should revert a few releases to when things had the correct levels of abstraction.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#77

Post by leephillips »

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.…

Reminds me of how I seem to need to purge anything related to "avahi" before I can get wireless networking to work. I don't know what that junk is for but I wish it wasn't installed by default.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#78

Post by jlgreco »

slacka wrote: post #74
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…

For watching movies or listening to music, the Linux audio system is fine, but ALSA and PulseAudio introduce unacceptable latency for game devs. For example the WINE developers are having major issues with PulseAudio's latency[1] There are actually 2 low level audio stacks that apps can use in Linux, OSS and ALSA. Only OSS offers great sound and low latency,[2] but the kernel developers have refused to add the free G…

I don't get this. When I play ioquake3 games I click my mouse, my gun fires, and I hear the gun firing sound. No latency.

Is the problem people trying to play sounds for games over the network with pulseaudio? Is that use-case really something that needs to be worried about?

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#79

Post by EdiX »

rayiner wrote: post #22
kfk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't even understand where this myths come from.

Linux "the kernel" switched 15 years ago from OSS to ALSA for drivers, ALSA has been backwards compatible with OSS since.

Gnome and KDE used to have their own user space sound servers (called EsounD and aRts) mostly to impement software mixing. They were completely replaced over 5 years ago by PulseAudio which is backwards compatible with both as well as applications using ALSA or OSS API.

You could code an application using OSS API and be compatible with the first release of linux that had sound. What problems do you have exactly with your beeps?

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#80

Post by emillon »

yebyen wrote: post #70
aerique wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is not how it works. The next release name is announced approximately when the freeze starts. When a release happens, oldstable is archived, stable become the new oldstable, and the current state of testing becomes the new stable.

For a moment of time (we're talking hours), testing and stable have the same set of packages. Britney, the software which migrates packages from unstable to testing, runs four times a day. During a freeze, it is configured to need "unblock exceptions" to migrate packages. When this is option is disabled, the following britney run will make the first difference between testing and stable.

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