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Comment by kabes | Hacker News Reader

You mean lennart poettering. Also the guy behind systemd. He's a bit controversial since he goes against the Unix philosophy and isn't very nuanced in expressing his opinion, but all criticism is easy in hindsight. Pulse audio was a great improvement over what was available at the time and systemd is IMO better than any alternative it replaced.

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The dark patterns he used to push systemd through is another reason. Making unrelated things dependent on it.

Personally I think the Linux world follows redhat way too closely. Especially since it's really IBM now.

But I'm more open to pipewire because of this. Having nice people behind it is important too IMO.

It's not that they follow, it's that RH does the heavy lifting nobody else wants to do (since RH devs are paid).

Blame the other vendors for not doing as much as Red Hat...

Well, Canonical does, to be fair. They just seem to be unsuccessful at gaining adoption. Part of this is my suspicion that they just do it to get their IP on the map (like with the snap store that only they can manage). But I would imagine that RedHat's goals are similar, after all they are a commercial entity too.

Personally I don't really trust either and I lament the high level of commercial involvement in Linux. It's one of the reasons I use FreeBSD. And they are still doing very well in features. For example they had jails (real containers, not chroot) way before Linux had containers.

I don't believe in "win-win scenarios" when it comes to commercialisation. In the end the commercial interests will always trump everything. I think RedHat's recent actions around CentOS are a good example of that.

Sometimes, less is more. Red Hat has an incentive to replace old, established, boring and well-known technology with new, exciting, unreliable and unfamiliar technology, because their income comes from support services.

Pulse audio was not an improvement in my experience. Uninstalling it improved my system every time. I don't use Bluetooth though.

The standard procedure for me is uninstalling pulseaudio and installing "apulse", which is ALSA-glue for applications that depend on pulseaudio, e.g. browsers. And my experience with Bluetooth is that it works fine directly with ALSA.

> all criticism is easy in hindsight

I'm pretty sure he got similar amounts of criticism at the time

Bookmarked for my edification.

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