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PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

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Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#41

Post by sianemo »

tpush wrote: post #21

My god the comments in this thread are terrible. How can grown ass adults be so pathetically mean to a single person because he wrote (free & gratis!) software they don't like. Seriously, it's mystifying.

I agree that the comments in this thread are uselessly snarky and uncivil, but Lennart Poettering is not just a single person who wrote software people don't like. PulseAudio has, deservedly or otherwise, been the face of audio issues in desktop Linux for coming on two decades now, and the tumultuous changeover to systemd as very nearly the mandatory init system for Linux left a sour taste for many long-time users.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#42

Post by traverseda »

tpush wrote: post #21

My god the comments in this thread are terrible. How can grown ass adults be so pathetically mean to a single person because he wrote (free & gratis!) software they don't like. Seriously, it's mystifying.

When his employer uses politics to try to coerce others into using that "free & gratis" software it can leave a bit of a bitter taste in your mouth.

It's not that something like pulseaudio is bad so we can just ignore it, it's that pulseaudio is bad because because redhat funds a lot of gnome stuff gnome won't really work unless you use pulseaudio, and since you use gnome you now have to use systemd. If pulseaudio just existed in a vacuum I don't think anyone would have an issue with it. If it wasn't bundled into a giant ecosystem it wouldn't be so bad, and if the redhat contributors involved cared more about non-redhat stakeholders I don't think people would have nearly as much ire.

But honestly writing "free & gratis" software that kind of sucks, and that forces you to use other sucky software, well I'm honestly not sure it's better than nothing. If it didn't exist I think some other solution would eventually come into being, and it might very well be a better solution. Sure it might not happen as quickly, but personally I'm alright with that.

It's not charity, it's not nobility, it's just redhat building a moat around their core business.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#43

Post by corrral »

sianemo wrote: post #41
tpush wrote: post #21

My god the comments in this thread are terrible. How can grown ass adults be so pathetically mean to a single person because he wrote (free & gratis!) software they don't like. Seriously, it's mystifying.

I agree that the comments in this thread are uselessly snarky and uncivil, but Lennart Poettering is not just a single person who wrote software people don't like. PulseAudio has, deservedly or otherwise, been the face of audio issues in desktop Linux for coming on two decades now, and the tumultuous changeover to systemd as very nearly the mandatory init system for Linux left a sour taste for many long-time users.

I don't think anyone would care (probably most of us here wouldn't even know his name) if these projects had been written and integrated such that it was trivial to avoid them in favor of alternatives. No-one who hated Upstart, say, is pissed off at the people who made it. Between Red Hat's maneuvering and Poettering's choices, though, it's not trivial to avoid them.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#44

Post by sam_lowry_ »

jacquesm wrote: post #23
gnulinux wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using linux for decades and by far -- by a HUGE margin -- PulseAudio has been the most annoying and broken thing I had to use. I'm still baffled by how something as basic as audio output can be eternally fragile in linux! And before you say you might have quirky hardware: my daily laptop is a Lenovo X1 Carbon 7th gen. Now (since 2021) I use PipeWire and tbh do not know to what extent pulseaudio codebase is…

The only way Pulseaudio is palatable is by using the Pulseaudio sink in Jack.

I settled on alsa and dmix as the ultimate solutuon.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#45

Post by _ofdw »

tpush wrote: post #21

My god the comments in this thread are terrible. How can grown ass adults be so pathetically mean to a single person because he wrote (free & gratis!) software they don't like. Seriously, it's mystifying.

>How can grown ass adults be so pathetically mean to a single person because he wrote (free & gratis!) software they don't like. Seriously, it's mystifying.

Because he and his orbiters were extraordinarily arrogant and condescending about their software. And let's not forget that while it's pretty good now, in the early days systemd was not very good at all. Because things like GNOME 3 decided to make systemd a hard dependency, pretty soon it became nearly impossible to avoid using the entire systemd stack even though it was nominally modular.

It's not just that he wrote $thing that someone didn't like. It's that $thing got shoved down everyone's throats at a time when $thing didn't work very well, and then when people rightfully objected, they were belittled by Poettering and his fan base.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#46

Post by jacquesm »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #44
jacquesm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way Pulseaudio is palatable is by using the Pulseaudio sink in Jack.

I settled on alsa and dmix as the ultimate solutuon.

That works as long as you are not too concerned about latency, but it is a bit easier to set up than Jack. Though Ubuntu Studio takes most of the sting out of it.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#47

Post by klodolph »

robonerd wrote: post #32
klodolph wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of breakage, complexity, and general fragility are you seeing with PulseAudio? Can you elaborate? One big problem here is that the "good path" for audio without PulseAudio applies to a shrinking segment of Linux user base.

Sound stops and doesn't work until I restart pulseaudio. You know, the usual. I think some people restart their whole computer and blame their drivers, but restarting pulseaudio alone is what fixes it nine times out of ten.

Interesting. I'd still rather have that problem than the massive, massive problems I tend to have without PulseAudio. Only one app can make sound at a time, can't adjust volume at all, that sort of thing.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#48

Post by [deleted] »

kyruzic wrote: post #15
zh3 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, Pulseaudio. One of those things that on the rare occasion it's worked out of the box it's then broken with one step of the beaten path. Evidently it seems to work for many people, the trouble it's caused has far outweighed any benefit (plus I know quite a few people dropped firefox for chrome when it went pulseaudio only - is that still the case?).

Pulseaudio is one of the absolute best parts of Linux. Have fun routing audio from one stream to one device and another stream to a different device on Windows or macos!

[deleted]

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#49

Post by sam_lowry_ »

TylerE wrote: post #33
vetinari wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audio in Linux before PA certainly wasn't working fine. Turning off your mp3 player and restarting your browser, because you want to play youtube via flash plugin? Sorry, but that's not fine. I had my share of hardware, and PA had problem with only one piece (a nettop with Nvidia Ion2, audio via hdmi). It turned out that the hardware couldn't really play 44,1 kHz audio, it's clock was too unreliable and resulted in d…

By far the best sound experience I've ever had on *nix was FreeBSD's fork of OSS. Dead simple API.. the /dev/dsp device had software multiplexing so multiple apps was no problem.

Alsa has it via dmix although not as the defaut. Probably because Lennaert.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#50

Post by shrubble »

tpush wrote: post #21

My god the comments in this thread are terrible. How can grown ass adults be so pathetically mean to a single person because he wrote (free & gratis!) software they don't like. Seriously, it's mystifying.

The combination of unbridled arrogance along with the dubious technical merits of your all-or-nothing design decisions, can lead to that; so, hardly mystifying.

Why does systemd need to mess with user processes and home directories? It was billed as a replacement for init.

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