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

111–120 of 238 posts

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#111

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#112

Post by quasive »

Udo wrote: post #88
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…

Yes, it is. I use Linux servers mostly, but about a year ago I installed openSuSE on two new desktops. The problem was that, while sound "worked" in general, only one application could use the sound card at a time. That means when you have your audio player open, Youtube won't work at the same time. You'd have to close both apps and then re-open the browser so it could then hog the audio. The most annoying thing abou…

This is absolutely unacceptable, and the main reason I still use a SoundBlaster Live instead of my onboard sound. The SBLive can do hardware mixing and the Linux driver makes this transparent, so even OSS programs can run simultaneously.

ALSA is supposed to be able to do this transparently (in software) with dmix, but in my experience that only works with ALSA-aware programs, not those using the OSS API. I don't care that on Linux OSS is deprecated: it should just work.

In short, Linux sound is still obnoxious unless you are lucky enough to have hardware mixing work, or you only use programs which properly deal with ALSA.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#113

Post by yew »

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…

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 daemon (stores settings for applications that care to use it, might be more than one of these - Xfce has two or three at the moment), a desktop manager (like a WM but for desktops), a window manager, a compositor (for special effects, might be part of the WM), plus miscellaneous bars, launchers, and plugins for same.

It's perfectly possible to split all this up, but then you have to make all the parts compatible. Most distros want more integration, not less.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#114

Post by nrivadeneira »

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 they have to say "Sorry, we don't do that."

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#115

Post by lmickh »

innguest wrote: post #106
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." "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 eve…

A lot of it probably stems from the use cases. Most Linux distros have the "out of the box" use case down. When people start to fiddle with it or push the limits, they increasingly change their tone. Nothing fanatical about it. Just different points of view.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#116

Post by 15charusername »

eliasmacpherson wrote: post #101
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…

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.

I'm sure there will be a GUI way to switch the default but I tend to use environmental variables when I want to launch a program out of a non-default device

>Is it possible to use/set environment variables to change the default ALSA device?

>you can use ALSA_PCM_CARD or ALSA_CARD to set the default card, either by name or by number. If both are set, ALSA_PCM_CARD takes precedence. The device on the card can be set in the variable ALSA_PCM_DEVICE.

http://alsa.opensrc.org/FAQ026

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#117

Post by mpyne »

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 haven't had a major problem with sound since probably KDE 3.4 timeframe or so.

But on the other hand I've kept about the same ALSA configuration the whole time. I don't know what it's like for the users using recent distros.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#118

Post by oakaz »

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…

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.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#119

Post by thwarted »

leephillips wrote: post #77
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.…

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, on other server installations.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_configuration_networking

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#120

Post by mpyne »

a1a wrote: post #90
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…

To summarize: 1. Remove your entire desktop environment, 2. Install just a window manager, 3. Now you don't have any program handling your sound, you just removed it, remember? (see (1) for reference), 4. Post on HN: "Yes, sound is still a problem."

KDE doesn't provide sound, just like KDE doesn't provide graphics drivers. I'm not sure why you feel sound support should be a function of the desktop environment.
Post reply on HN