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Comment by prewett | Hacker News Reader

PulseAudio was the last straw that pushed me to get a Mac. When I switched to Ubuntu, wifi worked, sleep (and more to the point, wake) on my T42 worked, and audio worked. Each release after that something would break, and but you couldn't really work around PulseAudio very well.

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Yeah, I had no idea PA was even a thing (and I guess it kinda wasn't yet, which is part of why the release was so rough) so that was a rude surprise when my whole system just... broke, on upgrade, in a ton of ways that they had to have known about. Especially when it was over audio, which was the one part of Linux that hadn't given me any trouble whatsoever since like 2002. I still kinda hold a grudge against Ubuntu and PA over that (in the case of PA it's also because, I'm pretty sure between that and SystemD, Poettering and I have very different ideas of what an appropriate level of engineering design-quality is for fundamental system components, and what quality design looks like—in fact I'd say he's the main reason I've become more distant from Linux over the last ~decade)

PipeWire (from the guy behind Gstreamer) is coming. Seems like it won't be anything like PulseAudio. The future seems exciting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PipeWire

There was an LWN article about PipeWire [1] a while back. Among the interesting parts of the article was an explanation for the PulseAudio debacle, and why PipeWire likely doesn't have the same problem. Basically, PulseAudio exercised several kernel APIs that had existed in ALSA for a long time, but had not been used widely. Hence it uncovered a ton of bugs in device drivers that were not tested against applications using these function calls before. By now, all those bugs are fixed because PulseAudio is widely used. PipeWire is using mostly the same APIs as PulseAudio and Jack, so it's not going to have the same troubles as PulseAudio.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26327779

Eh. PulseAudio is nothing like PulseAudio. People hated PA when it was forced into distros before it was ready, and still had many bugs. That PA doesn't exist any more and most of the issues have been ironed out for years. PulseAudio can do a lot more things than ALSA ever could.

(Yes, obviously at least one person reading this will still have intractable issues with PulseAudio, but there are exceptions to every rule. By and large it just works and has been a great solution for Linux for close to a decade now.)

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