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

201–210 of 238 posts

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#201

Post by VLM »

simonh wrote: post #67
VLM wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats a huge failure of abstraction. File a bug. A window manager should manage windows not sound. Someone outside the linux community would have no idea that the thing that controls title bars also happens to control sound. On Debian with ratpoison / awesome / KDE / probably others it "just works" and you don't control your sound with your window or whatever. It would be like configuring your mouse by modifying your…

>A window manager should manage windows not sound Here in the real world a desktop environment like Unity is a whoe lot more than just a window manager. It includes system management and configuration GUI components, including preferences panes and utilities to control audio functions. Unity is trying to provide a comprehensive user interface to the entire OS, or as much of it as possible.

And look what an epic failure that paradigm has turned into. Much like swiss army knives have ended production of all other tools, etc. No matter how good of a job you do going down the wrong path, fundamentally, you're still going down the wrong path.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#202

Post by bdunbar »

yew wrote: post #113
bdunbar wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

I guess I don't know what a Desktop Linux from a hole in the ground.

I use Slackware on my desktop, and it works just fine. I can switch WM using startx.

I will allow that installing Slack is not a pointy-clicky exercise, and if the application isn't in Slack's package manager you'll need to compile from source but .. it's not that complicated.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#203

Post by dhimes »

discodave wrote: post #163
dhimes wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't upvote this enough. At least put the cutsie name in the goddamn uname -a result. Drives me bonkers having to look that shit up.

lsb_release -a is what you want.

Thank you very very much. But I still think that it should be in uname -a. I have never heard of lsb_release... and I'm not new to the stuff.

If they really wanted to improve UI, it would also be in the 'system settings' link under the username on the desktop panel- for users that run desktops.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#204

Post by girvo »

rlu wrote: post #33
kfk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have a netbook running xubuntu and when I connect it to a TV via HDMI, the sound continues to come from the netbook rather than from the TV. I googled for some fixes and couldn't find any quick fix that worked. This should "just work" in my opinion. It does in Windows and I'm sure OSX makes it just as painless.

Doesn't in Windows, not on every laptop. Dell Studio 15 over here has the same problem on Windows 7. *shrugs, just wanted to add an anecdote.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#205

Post by simonh »

cjh_ wrote: post #96
simonh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A window manager should manage windows not sound Here in the real world a desktop environment like Unity is a whoe lot more than just a window manager. It includes system management and configuration GUI components, including preferences panes and utilities to control audio functions. Unity is trying to provide a comprehensive user interface to the entire OS, or as much of it as possible.

>Here in the real world a desktop environment like Unity is a whole lot more than just a window manager. That is why we distinguish between 'window manager' (only manages windows) and 'desktop environment' (a whole lot more).

Exactly. Unity is a desktop environment, not a window manager.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#206

Post by simonh »

VLM wrote: post #201
simonh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A window manager should manage windows not sound Here in the real world a desktop environment like Unity is a whoe lot more than just a window manager. It includes system management and configuration GUI components, including preferences panes and utilities to control audio functions. Unity is trying to provide a comprehensive user interface to the entire OS, or as much of it as possible.

And look what an epic failure that paradigm has turned into. Much like swiss army knives have ended production of all other tools, etc. No matter how good of a job you do going down the wrong path, fundamentally, you're still going down the wrong path.

I'm, sorry, are you suggesting that integrated GUI environemnts such as MacOSX, Windows (and I'd argue iOS and Android too), are epic failures? In contrast of course to the awesome, eternal empire of success that is the Linux desktop?

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#207

Post by mgkimsal »

octotoad wrote: post #141
aerique wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-professional, I use a non-realtime JACK as the new ESD. I prefer that over the incomprehensible monster that PulseAudio is. My needs are simple: I want sound from my audio player (MOC), from my browser (f.e. Youtube), from games and they shouldn't interfere. So my audio player shouldn't have exclusive access to the device and prevent me from hearing Youtube at the same time. JACK does all this, is easy to co…

Whenever I see this 'multiple apps using a sound card at once' issue mentioned, I try to recall what sort of ALSA 'voodoo' I've employed to make this work for me. Then I realise; absolutely nothing. I think the last time I ever had this problem was literally around 12 years ago, and it was caused by me fiddling with my alsa conf file. I haven't touched any ALSA related settings or done anything special in the last ~8…

happened for me as late as 2008 (last time I bothered checking) - GAIM/Pidgin were usually the culprit - once they'd played a sound, nothing else could until I killed it. Had issues on Ubuntu and Mandriva (and IIRC) fedora, over several versions, with both KDE and Gnome setups, on multiple laptops. Grew tired, switched to macbooks/osx.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#208

Post by lmm »

oakaz wrote: post #118
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…

Yes, it really is. So many Linux users prefer OSS (Open Sound System) over ALSA because ALSA gives damn poor sound quality. Just search it and see how people gets disappointed with the sound quality of ALSA.

An unexpected bonus when switching to FreeBSD was that it still uses OSS, and like the rest of FreeBSD it all works - maybe not out of the box, but once you've configured it it will never just break for no reason - the way linux of 5-10 years ago used to.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#209

Post by yew »

bdunbar wrote: post #202
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. I guess I don't know what a Desktop Linux from a hole in the ground. I use Slackware on my desktop, and it works just fine. I can switch WM using startx. I will allow that installing Slack is not a pointy-clicky exercise, and if the applica…

I hope you know what Desktop Linux is. I don't care that you don't use a Desktop distro because I use Gentoo and XMonad and am generally quite comfortable with both.

As for complicated well, that depends - complicated for who? There are a lot of people who couldn't configure && make && make install if their lives depended on it. Even if their lives literally depended on it. That's not necessarily their fault, but there you are nonetheless.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#210

Post by parfe »

rlu wrote: post #33
kfk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have a netbook running xubuntu and when I connect it to a TV via HDMI, the sound continues to come from the netbook rather than from the TV. I googled for some fixes and couldn't find any quick fix that worked. This should "just work" in my opinion. It does in Windows and I'm sure OSX makes it just as painless.

Quickfix: Install pavucontrol. You can control on a per application basis which output to send audio to and move the stream on the fly.

It doesn't "Just work" in windows. Windows will set a default and send all audio to that device without any controls for moving audio from one output to another. I have to restart my browser if I want to move from watching netflix on my monitor to my TV.

Post reply on HN