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Linux is not about choice (2008)

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Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#81

Post by walls »

teeja wrote: post #49
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…

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.

> During that period (I can guarantee!) both Win and OSX were ALSO -miserable- experiences.

Really? Because Windows XP has been out for 12 years, and that was far from a "miserable experience".

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#83

Post by walls »

EdiX wrote: post #79
rayiner wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 application…

You got lucky with your hardware; nothing more. Sound in Linux has been a living nightmare.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#84

Post by dman »

ethomson wrote: post #76
glesica wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

You have to either get comfortable living in someone elses reality or accept the burden/freedom of creating your own reality.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#86

Post by toyg »

leephillips wrote: post #77
pmahoney wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It provides compatibility with Apple's more recent network technologies (Bonjour/Rendezvous etc), plus probably other stuff I don't know anything about.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#87

Post by javert »

danielweber wrote: post #44
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…

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

My experience is, don't use Ubuntu if you don't want the defaults they ship. It's not meant to be customizable.

I'd recommend Arch Linux. It just makes sense.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#88

Post by Udo »

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…

Yes, it is.

I use Linux servers mostly, but about a year ago I installed openSuSE on two new desktops. The problem was that, while sound "worked" in general, only one application could use the sound card at a time. That means when you have your audio player open, Youtube won't work at the same time. You'd have to close both apps and then re-open the browser so it could then hog the audio.

The most annoying thing about this, however, were some of my desktop Linux friends who insisted this behavior was totally acceptable and not a bug.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#89

Post by dekhn »

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…

I just spent a big part of my weekend debugging why sound stopped working on my machine.

It ended up being several different reasons:

1) pulseaudio/JACK integration problems 2) my audio hardware moved from one device number to another.

ultimately this required editing config files, running strace, and inspecting log files closely.

linux is only free if your time is worthless.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#90

Post by a1a »

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…

To summarize:

1. Remove your entire desktop environment,

2. Install just a window manager,

3. Now you don't have any program handling your sound, you just removed it, remember? (see (1) for reference),

4. Post on HN: "Yes, sound is still a problem."

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