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Linux is not about choice (2008)

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Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#171

Post by shardling »

jebblue wrote: post #125
mpyne wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's as right now as it was 5 years ago, and has a lot of corrolary with other customer-facing, resource-constrained software maintenance environments that you might see from a YC participant. And I say this as a Linux user who doesn't use PulseAudio...

>> And I say this as a Linux user who doesn't use PulseAudio... PulseAudio works great in Linux? We can switch easily between a headset mic, web cam mic, builtin mic, etc. I think this is still problematic on Windows.

Yeah, I still have problems with OS X not switching to USB speakers easily, when that worked with PulseAudio.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#172

Post by darkr »

gizmo686 wrote: post #166
yew wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern Desktop Linux is very fragile because everything has to be configured and managed automatically. You haven't been able to startx without a lot of reconfiguring for years. Ideally you want a full Desktop environment, but at a minimum you need a session manager (for auto-starting everything else, communicating with the * kits, * buses, * agents, and * managers for device integration, etc . . .), a settings daemo…

>Modern Desktop Linux is very fragile because everything has to be configured and managed automatically. You haven't been able to startx without a lot of reconfiguring for years. What distribution does not support startx out of the box. If you boot into terminal (or kill the X service), then startx should just do whatever the system does to start the X server anyway.

I turned my back on 'Modern Desktop Linux' a few years ago and haven't looked back since.

In my .profile I have: # if logging into tty6 startx if [ -z "$DISPLAY" ] && [ $(tty) = /dev/tty6 ]; then startx ; fi

Then in my .xinitrc I have xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources eval $(gpg-agent --daemon) exec ck-launch-session dbus-launch awesome

My full desktop environment uses 116MB RAM at boot and everything works flawlessly.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#174

Post by njr123 »

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.

Are you trolling? 5 to 10 years ago?! Windows 7 already came out 4 years ago. Windows XP is 12 years old, and audio already worked perfectly then. Hell, I can remember using Win 3.1 almost 20 years ago, and the audio there worked pretty well too, for the limited use cases the pc could handle.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#175

Post by hythloday »

gcb0 wrote: post #167
hythloday wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because I don't need a fricking web search to know if 3 comes before or after 4. Now, this phone runs android Diabetes, and you want a feature introduced in android Cavity. Should I buy this one? I don't f#&$%#& know!

Both Ubuntu and Android use alphabetically sorted release names that are dense - so it's equally easy to know if Ice Cream Sandwich comes before Jellybean (it's the release before), assuming you're not dyslexic (which I am).

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#176

Post by gizzlon »

nrivadeneira wrote: post #114
pixelmonkey wrote: post #107

"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…

"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." I'm experiencing exactly this. It's like they want to have every feature to be able to whip out for every type of customer. They dread the circumstance where t…

Well, they often work on commission..

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#177

Post by azernik »

err_badprocrast wrote: post #170
vacri wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 versioni…

wouldn't searching for "debian 7" with the quote marks fix that issue?

Which sacrifices completeness of results for accuracy - e.g. "my Debian version is 7" would not match the query.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#178

Post by virtualwhys »

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…

pulseaudio -k

Was more than helpful pre-Fedora 18 in dealing with sound issues; now, things are pretty good.

Gnome 3 on the other hand, wow, fail whale on many fronts ;-)

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#179

Post by bkor »

marshray wrote: post #149

Who is this redhat.com and why should I care what color their fedora is? Of course I'm being a quite facetious here. But the point is that I have many computers and VMs running several operating systems, many with Linux kernels, but somehow I've not chosen the Red Fedora. I wasn't aware they even cared that much about desktop users. Perhaps I have the "disease which strangles the mind"?

You should investigate how much Red Hat contributes all over Linux. Server side, but also loads of components used by various desktops.

Not knowing about the huge contributions makes it overdue to investigate.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#180

Post by bkor »

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…

Your takeaway should be that the speaker is very confused and got a lot of things totally wrong.

The presentation is not about PulseAudio, it is about various stacks. The amount of things he states that are just wrong is unbelievable. Lennart is pointing out all the flaws. It has been suggested that this somehow is an attack. IMO, if a talk need that much correcting, something is wrong with the talk.

Anyway, one confused speaker is not representive of a community.

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