Linux is not about choice (2008)

> If you try to deliver both at once you have to also deliver a way of switching between the two.

And they delivered alsa and pulseaudio (which used alsa). And now it's alsa and pipewire. SW is hard. Why not develop alsa ? Why do they had to do pulseaudio which shiped broken and needed years to work properly. There is a big difference between choice and being forced broken SW because "it is inovative". (the only inovation Pulseaudio brought me was using killall -9 pulseaudiod to make sound work again).

The problem with linux is the same as with all SW: every couple of years comes someone who declares that almost everything done until now is crap and must be forget to make room for the latest and greatest AI/ML/UI/UX concept. They are never able to make something that lasts (see Gnome and KDE - every release is incompatible with the previous and future versions).

I completely agree with the author here. Linux is vastly unattractive to me as a desktop environment pretty much for this reason; everything is customizable to the nth degree, which cool whatever, but a lot of it simply doesn't work.

The audio server examples are a great example, and probably the worst offenders; sound management on just about any OS is terrible (MacOS does it best, currently) but Linux is the worst. I couldn't even build JACK1 or 2 from source a couple of years ago and the development efforts were mostly dead.

And don't get me started on graphical environments.

I love Linux, I love what it's all about, but I don't think I'll ever install another desktop environment again. I use WSL and while I despise everything about Windows, at least it works.

Consequently, this whole area of frustration is what got me into OSDev to begin with...

“Software is hard. The way to fix it is to fix it, not sweep it under the rug.”

Amen.

The issue is that Red Hat's solution to this has almost always been Another Competing Standard.

> Situation: There are 140 different desktop environments.

> "140! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard desktop that covers everyone's use cases!"

> Situation: There are now 141 different desktop environments.

The only difference between this and the XKCD comic is that there's no one saying "Yeah!" to Red Hat's ideas.