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Linux is not about choice (2008)

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Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#101

Post by eliasmacpherson »

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…

Am on debian squeeze, and am not able to find out how to switch between soundcards as the default. Sure I can fire up VLC or Audacity and select within, but the default movie player picks the default sound card and I can't see a way to change it. A minor gripe, probably user error on my part. Also youtube etc use the default soundcard.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#102

Post by slashclee »

MostAwesomeDude wrote: post #99

Ctrl+F "ajax" isn't finding anything, so... The poster here goes by "ajax" on more useful communication channels (i.e. IRC). He's one of the most competent hackers I've ever been able to work with, and his ethos comes through loud and clear here: If code is broken, fix it. If code is being misused, stop abusing it. If code is missing, write it.

You're forgetting perhaps the most powerful ethos of ajax: If the code can be deleted, nuke it.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#103

Post by cjh_ »

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…

For the most part, sound is not still a problem.

I commonly use 3 machines where I want sound (work,home,laptop) running a variety of different distros (arch,debian,ubuntu) and sounds works for me in all of them, mostly alsa although ubuntu is pulseaudio.

In the 99% case it just works, the only config I have to do is for my external DAC and that requires a few line config file (telling alsa to default to using my DAC rather than the first card it finds)

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#104

Post by dnewcome »

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.…

You can prefix your command with pasuspender to temporarily disable pulseaudio. This is usually what I do. It's kind of inconvenient and half the time I forget to do it, so sometimes I just write a little launcher script that includes it.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#105

Post by bdunbar »

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…

> Once you do something as drastic as changing the default window manager on a distro you are largely on your own.

That's crazy. When did Linux get so _fragile_?

A windows manager is the application that handles windows management. Applications (browser, word processor) don't care what WM is running, and neither should utilities.

Changing a WM is strait forward. Exit, run 'xwmconfig', then startx and I'm back in.

Maybe Slack has me spoiled, or something - are the so-called modern Linuxi really so crufty that changing a WM cripples the host?

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#106

Post by innguest »

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."

"Not really."

"Linux sound hasn't been a problem for some of us for, oh, I don't know, well over 10 years"

"Sound on Linux wasn't a problem 5 years ago. In fact, it wasn't a problem even earlier."

"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."

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

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

Another reason I gave up on Linux was all the denialists that insisted that everything works fine on Linux and that if it's not working fine for me then I must be doing something wrong.

I don't understand how one can come here and say "Not a problem" edgewise to so many comments saying "Yes, definitely". Never listen to a fanatic, I guess.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#107

Post by pixelmonkey »

"Software is hard. The way to fix it is to fix it, not sweep it under the rug."

Love this line. Been thinking a lot about this as I work on scaling a large-ish SaaS product that has been in the market for 18 months.

One other interesting dynamic: sales teams always think it's better to add things than to remove things (after all, you can't sell the things you remove), which I now realize is partially the reason many enterprise software packages feel "bloated" over time.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#108

Post by bdunbar »

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…

> What does that even mean?

I think it means 'use Slackware'.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#109

Post by Daishiman »

bdunbar wrote: post #105
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…

> Once you do something as drastic as changing the default window manager on a distro you are largely on your own. That's crazy. When did Linux get so _fragile_? A windows manager is the application that handles windows management. Applications (browser, word processor) don't care what WM is running, and neither should utilities. Changing a WM is strait forward. Exit, run 'xwmconfig', then startx and I'm back in. May…

When users expect everything to "just work", it means that automated configuration has to integrate with a ton of components, thus supporting alternatives for every section of the stack becomes a huge endeavour.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#110

Post by hythloday »

gcb0 wrote: post #95
yebyen wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is a version alias for v7. testing is testing. it points to the version that is on testing, be it 7-wheezy, or 8-whatever. the only exception to the rule is 'sid'. debian sid is always the bleeding edge, it never becomes a proper version. btw, i hate every versioning alias scheme that does not force the number to appear. such as debian, ubuntu, android... it's all just idiotic.

Why is a number more useful than how Ubuntu or Android do things?
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