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

211–220 of 238 posts

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#211

Post by anonymous »

CatMtKing wrote: post #55
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…

PulseAudio still gives me pain. There's an intel-hda driver issue https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=920549 that has a workaround, but the workaround only f's up other programs for me.

> ATI on-board sound

My condolences. I also have that one and solved the problem by shoving a cheap second hand Creative SB Audigy in the PCI slot. And It still crackles and pops and messes up every time skype makes a sound.

Edit: to clarify, using a PCI soundcard solved the crackling and popping in every application except skype, which I find acceptable for now, since I don't usually talk on skype. I might experiment with using JACK and somehow routing pulse through that.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#212

Post by mpyne »

bkor wrote: post #186
mpyne wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

KDE has Phonon. KDE doesn't have sound drivers, but it should have a mixer, it does have Phonon, etc.

Phonon is not a mixer. Phonon is essentially a built-in adapter layer over whatever audio driver and media decoder libraries you already have.

It's a little more complex nowadays as it was substantially modified to be a good PulseAudio citizen when running with PulseAudio, but Phonon doesn't talk to hardware, it talks to sound libraries such as VLC, gstreamer, or PulseAudio.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#213

Post by mpyne »

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.

I do literally none of these things though. My speakers have a headphone port which works perfectly 100% of the time without needing an entire new sound server to route all audio through. There's a reason my sound has continued to work properly for years, and that's because I didn't "fix it" when it wasn't broken. ;)

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#214

Post by bdunbar »

yew wrote: post #209
bdunbar wrote: post #202

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. 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 t…

> I hope you know what Desktop Linux is.

Until yesterday, if asked, I would have said 'A linux for end users'.

And if asked for an example I would have pointed at my laptops running Slack/Enlightenment and said 'like that'.

Maybe it's where I'm at: the only people I know who run Linux are guys who aren't above compiling from source when needed.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#215

Post by thelukester »

quasive wrote: post #112
Udo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having dedicated hardware for sound mixing is always a good idea. This is especially noticeable when the CPU is under heavy load like when games are running.

Take a look on Windows:

Windows XP: hardware mixing

Windows 7: change to software mixing which cause serious latency problem http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iujDVsg_2xY

Windows 8: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr.../br259116.aspx they realize their mistake and go back to hardware mixing again

The only way I was able to solve the cracking and latency issues on my Linux box was to replace ALSA with OSS. Recently some newer software is causing issues again and I might have to give ALSA another shot. Things would be so much better if the Linux kernel just adopted OSS4

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#216

Post by a1a »

mpyne wrote: post #120
a1a wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My opinion on what should be a part of what is irrelevant.

My post was regarding the fact that people blame Linux when the real problem is their own lack of understanding.

A good answer to the original question would be: "Sound is not a problem in Linux. However, compared to other operating systems, it might require additional understanding of the way things work, especially if you want to customize your system. This requirement of knowledge is a problem in distributions like Ubuntu - where the user base is 'everyday people'."

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#217

Post by pjmlp »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #197
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…

As a Java game engine developer, I can say it's still a problem with Java. Sound mixing will work or not depending on people's installed sound system, sound cards, Linux distro, and a plethora of other factors I don't understand (and apparently no one understands, according to forum searches). And yes, I know most of you don't like Java, but this is still a problem that doesn't happen in any other OS (OS X is Unix an…

The problem with UNIX is that it is too abstract concept.

The POSIX standard will only cover you an API for command line applications and daemons, everything else is vendor specific.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#218

Post by ___1___ »

mgkimsal wrote: post #150
Udo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"The most annoying thing about this, however, were some of my desktop Linux friends who insisted this behavior was totally acceptable and not a bug." Bingo. Spot on, and you've hit the biggest meta-issue when discussing desktop Linux usability issues. There isn't an agreed upon definition for "acceptable" that everyone can use to determine if something is really broken or not. I hit the same issue years ago, complain…

I don't know what decade you last tried a linux desktop but every distro I have used supports playing from multiple programs concurrently fine.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#219

Post by takluyver »

pyre wrote: post #148
takluyver wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know how frustrating it can be when your bug isn't getting attention, but I've also been on the other side of that. It's not like Ubuntu (or any project) has hordes of developers who're just too lazy to tackle your bug: maybe not many people have that model, or don't tend to switch between speakers and headphones much. Maybe people couldn't reproduce the bug, or maybe just no-one could see how to fix it. There's a…

I realize that there are reasons, and I'm not necessarily angry at Ubuntu, but I've dealt with these types of issues before and it's frustrating. I had the ALSA source code and was ready to attempt some hardware hacking, but: 1) The chipset was a common one, and the issue specific to this model. I had no idea how to proceed from there. 2) I couldn't make heads or tails out of the structure of the code, and what was h…

Perhaps the problem is that in large projects, many areas don't have someone who feels ultimately responsible for making sure each bug gets a response. It's very easy to glance over a list of new bugs and leave the ones you don't know anything about for someone else to tackle, but inevitably there are bugs that no-one really feels comfortable tackling. Hardware specific stuff is especially bad, because device interfaces do some crazy things, and only someone with the same model can investigate it.

Kudos for being willing to dive into the code, though, and I'm sorry to hear no-one offered advice with that.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#220

Post by EvilLook »

bdunbar wrote: post #214
yew wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> I hope you know what Desktop Linux is. Until yesterday, if asked, I would have said 'A linux for end users'. And if asked for an example I would have pointed at my laptops running Slack/Enlightenment and said 'like that'. Maybe it's where I'm at: the only people I know who run Linux are guys who aren't above compiling from source when needed.

Apparently I don't run desktop Linux either because I have no problems editing settings with a text editor, nor do I drool on myself when it comes to reading documentation.
Post reply on HN