Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linux is not about choice (2008)

redhat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 238 posts

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#151

Post by benihana »

bifrost wrote: post #17

I'm not sure what this thread is about frankly. It reeks of "ooh, linux is great because its !somethingelse" that used to pervade academia and a lot of the industry. Frankly that still pervades but there's finally more substance behind "Linux" as a whole. For a lot of newbies "Linux" was their first experience with a unix-like system, so they either loved it or were made to use it and became familiar with it. Thats n…

>I'm not sure what this thread is about frankly.

Make a decision, even if it's difficult and even if it will piss off your users. Don't defer the making of a decision to the user and hide behind "choice"

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#152

Post by marshray »

jebblue wrote: post #126
felipebueno wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's still relevant and, I guess, that's why you are being downvoted.

Ubuntu has won the Desktop and Server Linux wars so the article is no longer valid. RedHat doesn't even care about Desktop Linux or consumers using Linux.

If there is such a thing as "The Linux Desktop and Server Wars" I'd rather say that Android and hypervisor virtualization have won them.

Which is to say I think it's more about whether or not we were asking the right questions back then. And are we now?

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#153

Post by marshray »

thwarted wrote: post #119
leephillips wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know why it is generally enabled on "server" installations. That being said, the only time I've had a legit use of it was on a media server, running mediatomb, which uses avahi to do SSDP/mDNS/zeroconf/DNS-SD [1], and on the client running VLC (I think the "local network" options interface with avahi itself). Which actually ended up being quite nice. I usually disable it, and try to uninstall it completely, o…

I can't seem to install GVIM on Ubuntu without avahi. I wish I had more choice about it.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#154

Post by fmoralesc »

aclevernickname wrote: post #134
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.…

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…

Whoa! These cadence utils are great! Bridging jack and pulseaudio has always been such a pain...

Thanks for the link!

In case anyone is interested: I'm using them on Arch, they are available through the AUR.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#155

Post by coldtea »

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…

>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.

So, in other words, it really is. All you said was just rephrasing the problem as solved.

For one, what's "exceedingly rare" is not getting any sound at all. That doesn't mean you get to enjoy all the features of your soundcard (from mixing panels to 3D audio and such). Or that it work without tinkering in ALL programs and across desktop environments.

There's also the issue of more professional sound work, which will be a world of pain. Getting any pro, multi-channel soundcards to work and such.

For anything else than basic sound playing, from recording a podcast, to streaming, to using a DAW etc, here be dragons.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#156

Post by throwaway1980 »

takluyver wrote: post #146
throwaway1980 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, also problems with wireless/wired network card drivers and DVD playback are common. These are the kinds of things where you've just gotten them working, then you upgrade your distro and they stop working again. In theory they all probably work, even for your hardware, but getting the right versions of all the software necessary running at once on your machine is a pain. It doesn't have anything to do with paying…

OK, I'm curious: DVD playback is definitely a bit of a fiddle (mostly for legal reasons), and I've heard of wifi problems (although I understand most recent chipsets work)... but wired network drivers? I've never heard about problems with wired networking, and none of the computers I've installed Linux on has ever had a problem with it.

It was a Thinkpad from around 1999, and my ethernet stopped working after an Ubuntu upgrade, sometime around kernel 2.6.8 if I remember correctly. I'm sure there'd have been a fix if I'd found the right forum or IRC channel, but having lived through Gentoo and Debian installs, by then I had simply stopped caring. Apple was making fully functional Unix desktops, which is all I really cared about, so I went and got one and that was that.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#157

Post by mayhew »

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've been using Linux for about 2-3 years now, and in every distribution I've used (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch), sound has "just worked".

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#158

Post by cageface »

coldtea wrote: post #155
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…

> 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. So, in other words, it really is. Al…

The dog's breakfast of audio standards on Linux neatly encapsulates the weaknesses of systems as open and democratic as Linux and illustrates why it thrives on servers where these issues are less pressing and still languishes on the desktop where too much choice is not a virtue.

This legacy hampers Android too, which is a joke when it comes to multimedia APIs compared to the oligarchic iOS.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#159

Post by jebblue »

marshray wrote: post #152
jebblue wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu has won the Desktop and Server Linux wars so the article is no longer valid. RedHat doesn't even care about Desktop Linux or consumers using Linux.

If there is such a thing as "The Linux Desktop and Server Wars" I'd rather say that Android and hypervisor virtualization have won them. Which is to say I think it's more about whether or not we were asking the right questions back then. And are we now?

Are you running Android on your Desktop? No. So, no, Android is a great phone OS. It and the whole crappy touch experience have not and will not replace a Desktop.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#160

Post by ctdonath »

VLM wrote: post #64
roc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tur…

Great. Now I have to spend inordinate time mining the proliferation of answers for the correct one. Google is great at showing you wrong/invalid/incomplete answers to questions asked years ago, burying the rare & obscure answers you're looking for.

This instead of it just working, and/or having a definitive central answer site.

Post reply on HN