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Linux is not about choice (2008)

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Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#131

Post by vinkelhake »

justsee wrote: post #128

This was an entertaining talk from CCC in 2011 on desktop Linux. 'datenwolf' was the speaker, and he starts talking about sound in Linux here. [1] He's quickly interrupted by the maintainer of PulseAudio, and this interruption continues throughout the talk. My takeaway was that if there was still this amount of confusion and misunderstanding in the community, my frustrating experiences with sound in desktop Ubuntu wa…

Wolfgang 'datenwolf' Draxinger later, in true Bender-style, started his own audio system [1]. The creator of JACK had some comments [2]. They also went head to head in a thread on phoronix around that time.

[1] http://klang.eudyptula.org [2] https://community.ardour.org/pd_on_klang

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#132

Post by eridius »

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.

Do you have anything at all to back up this claim? Sound on Mac OS and OS X has always been an It Just Works™ experience, largely due to the tight integration between the hardware and the software (never any driver issues, etc).

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#133

Post by vacri »

cookiecaper wrote: post #121
hythloday wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because it conveys relevant information. If you were on version 7 and the new version is version 13, a message is conveyed that there have been several major iterations since your last upgrade. Numerical versioning schemes (in general) make it simple to know if you're on a current version, and if not, how far off you are. Now consider trying to make similar determinations if you know you're running "Gingerbread" but…

The unique names really help with googleability. 'debian 7' will return more chaff than 'debian wheezy'. "Where's the 7 on this site? Oh, it's the forum page number" and so forth. Similarly I can ask a dev in a mixed shop "is wheezy or precise on this" and it's easier than saying "is debian 7 or ubuntu 12.04 on this". Ubuntu numbers are unusually regular and unique, which helps their googleability, but other versioning numbers aren't.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#134

Post by aclevernickname »

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.…

May I humbly recommend adding the KXstudio Repos (https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+ppas?name_filter=kxstudio) to your Ubuntu installation? the Cadence utility makes JACK configuration very painless, automagically setting up JACK to run everything, with ALSA loopback and PulseAudio bridges for input and output. Firefox/Flash/Phonon/Skype all route through PulseAudio, which gets sent to JACK. all ALSA-only applications get routed through Loopback, which gets sent to JACK. And you can route all of this sound (visually, if you use the Claudia app) to whatever processing or recording application you want.

Two weeks ago, I spent 20 minutes with 3 KXStudio Laptops and a master KXStudio workstation, and got all the laptops acting as input slaves to pipe live instruments and mics to Ardour running on the workstation using Opus as the transferring codec. all it took was loading the network module into JACK, and making sure there was gigE/cat6 for networking. we had mp3's and FLAC's of the concert ready for the band to review before their roadies were done packing up the gear.

As for high-end hardware, the laptops are using M-Audio Fast Track Pros and 10/10's. None of the hardware goes for more than $150, and we're using ultra-cheap AMD Fusion laptop slaves sourced from alibaba with an AMD A10-based workstation as master. We're at $2800, including 3 monitors.

Because an AMD A10 with 12GB of RAM is stupid overpowered for audio production, we installed MacOS X via KVM and routed that output through JACK as well. WINE loads quite a few professional digital audio workstation packages, and a ton of VSTs, and wineasio makes them all work with JACK. Running all this emulation doesn't make the system feel sluggish at all.

the main website is http://kxstudio.sourceforge.net, but the LiveCD downloadable there is based on Ubuntu 12.04. I installed raring, added the PPA's, and then installed packages. I like bleeding edge. but the official livecd is _very_ painless to install if you're having headaches configuring.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#135

Post by vacri »

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.

Reminds me of hunting for apps the windows way: figure out a need, google for it, find a tool some random person wrote somewhere, try and figure out if the download service they're using is reputable, watch the install process for malware you can see (like drive-by toolbar install tickboxes), et ceter and ra.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#136

Post by makomk »

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. My current fun issue with PulseAudio is that volume control handling is broken in all sorts of interesting ways, especially with applications that try and change their own volume. Also it randomly stops playing sound correctly and has to be killed and restarted if I want to get it back.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#137

Post by nnoitra »

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…

And it still is a failure.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#138

Post by [deleted] »

cookiecaper wrote: post #121
hythloday wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because it conveys relevant information. If you were on version 7 and the new version is version 13, a message is conveyed that there have been several major iterations since your last upgrade. Numerical versioning schemes (in general) make it simple to know if you're on a current version, and if not, how far off you are. Now consider trying to make similar determinations if you know you're running "Gingerbread" but…

[deleted]

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#139

Post by glesica »

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…

Apologies, I was very much conflating WM and DE. However, you mentioned Unity, which is really both (Unity itself is a DE but it brings its own WM to the table and assumes that you will use it). My point was that if you insist on extensive customization, you should be prepared to do some work. If you don't want to spend a lot of time fiddling (I know I don't) then you find a distro that does things the way you want them done and you use it. Things are the same in the Windows and Mac world, for better or worse.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#140

Post by makomk »

justsee wrote: post #128

This was an entertaining talk from CCC in 2011 on desktop Linux. 'datenwolf' was the speaker, and he starts talking about sound in Linux here. [1] He's quickly interrupted by the maintainer of PulseAudio, and this interruption continues throughout the talk. My takeaway was that if there was still this amount of confusion and misunderstanding in the community, my frustrating experiences with sound in desktop Ubuntu wa…

PulseAudio decided - as it does - to turn my headphone volume up to 100% when that video started playing. Gotta love audio on Linux!
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