Maybe he'll go on to become an Executive Vice President at Microsoft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop
cough Miguel de Icaza cough
PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
51–60 of 193 posts
Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
#52He can easily hop ship wherever he wants given the major impact he's landed in PulseAudio, Systemd and elsewhere. His design decisions have certainly been controversial but his impact is certainly agreed upon.
>He can easily hop ship wherever he wants given the major impact he's landed
I don't know about that. Talent alone doesn't make someone a good fit for a team. Would you want to work alongside Poettering? Or de Raadt?
I wouldn't, and that means I wouldn't hire them either.
Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
#53My 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.
The biggest problem with systemd is that it broke with so many "established practices" and philosophies of a lot of distributions and iirc it took a while for generators to appear that automagically integrate old-school sysvinit scripts into systemd, meaning an awful lot of work for distributions to recreate unit files with sometimes decades of history buried in the old init scripts. Additionally, its overhaul of logging broke established file-based workflows.
Personally I'm happy with systemd these days - it has a steep learning curve but once you get how to write them and how dependency ordering works, it's just a breeze.
If there is one thing the Linux ecoysystem desperately needs if it ever wants to be a serious challenger on the desktop, it's standardization for software vendors... and slowly but surely, life gets easier, in no small part thanks to systemd.
Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
#54Earlier 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!
On Mac, at least, this is easy with tools from Rouge Amoeba. Audio Hijack and Loopback being the main tools I've used to do this.
Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm still baffled by how something as basic as audio output can be eternally fragile in linux Yeah, broken drivers. You see, before pulseaudio came along, audio drivers were barely used and needed to be tuned for each use case. Most drivers barely implemented ALSA, almost none correctly. If you wanted fancy features (say; software input mixing, so that more than just one application can actually output sound) you n…
Driver issues, right.. is that why my archived shell histories have hundreds if not thousands of entries for `pulseaudio --kill ; puslseaudio --start` ? Does restarting the userland sound daemon reset the drivers operating in kernel space? How would that work?
Have never used those APIs, but I would assume it'd happen if drivers fail to implement basic API promises and PulseAudio doesn't code defensively against those kind of bugs.
Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
#56My 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.
Then don't use it. No one is forcing you, there exist alternatives. Attacking someone for making an optional thing seems kinda like the problem lies in you.
Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
#57My 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.
> because he wrote (free & gratis!) software they don't like
I don't think you understand what the story was.
Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what kind of audio configurations you've lived with. I do remember when PulseAudio seemed to be the source of many problems, but this was over a decade ago. One of the big problems is that the Linux audio stack is built out of components that rely on assumptions about the next lower level of the stack that are often untrue. You might assume that your audio hardware has a volume control, assume it can per…
Stock Asus motherboards with on-board (Realtek, IIRC) audio (I tried aftermarket cards, though mostly after giving up on PulseAudio). Separately the company I worked for ditched it as well due to the issues, to be fair though in tnat case since they only needed a single - reliable - audio output so there was no case of PA anyway.
Yea that is because anything Realtek is an utterly brain-dead piece of crap and "quirks", and that on Windows. On Linux it's even more pain, mostly because OEMs don't bother to release the specific quirks their specialized Windows driver fork had applied. Don't even want to know how many Windows systems ship with outdated, possibly insecure Realtek drivers because the OEM long since stopped backporting fixes.
Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
#59He can easily hop ship wherever he wants given the major impact he's landed in PulseAudio, Systemd and elsewhere. His design decisions have certainly been controversial but his impact is certainly agreed upon.
I'm not sure about SystemD, but PulseAudio is definitely a piece of software I wouldn't brag about. If you work on an existing codebase and do what your employer says, that's one thing, but when you have the rare freedom to design a system from the ground up, I expect it to do at least one thing: to run.