Comment by Maxious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Maxious | Hacker News Reader

"You seem to know a lot of stuff about me. I am not particular fond of people who turn their dislike of software I wrote into personal accusations and judging in a public forum." - Lennart Poettering Sep 21, 2008 http://lwn.net/Articles/299615/

For what it's worth, 4 years on I still struggle daily with audio and only audio on Linux. I'm not in a position to tell if it's ALSA or PulseAudio that makes nothing come out unless I plug/unplug, mute/unmute in the correct order everytime I come back from suspend/open a different app/want to use headphones. But I didn't have these problems before Fedora 8 when I was using ESD ;)

And just recently I've resorted to manually starting couchdb in a console instead of using the init scripts on fedora because after upgrading to 15 they do some bad things to file permissions. Is it the distributors fault or is it systemd? Correlation does not imply causation?

Why does nobody else create a better sound system?

Oh they do, all the time. OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio... http://xkcd.com/927/

ALSA already is the better sound system as long as you don't need all your applications to have one extra redundant volume control or playing audio on a remote computer over the internet. However de-pulsifying a linux install correctly isn't easy.

" or playing audio on a remote computer over the internet".

I thought thats the point of pulseaudio and really wanted to try it.

How can I say... it FAILS at even that! I got it working with ssh and mpd faster than... oh dont make remember.

> " or playing audio on a remote computer over the internet". > > I thought thats the point of pulseaudio and really wanted to try it.

AFAIK (but I wasn't using linux at the time) the point of pulseaudio was that it was very easy for an application to lock your audio exclusively with ALSA or OSS (and still is unless ALSA is properly configured) and there were several competing "sound daemon" trying to solve this problem. Pulse audio was supposed to be the one true sound daemon, emulating everything else under the sun. Then it got sound mixing and networked audio bolted on because Poettering is the master of the kitchen sink.

The right thing to do would have been to fix ALSA so that applications wouldn't lock each other out, or whatever other problems ALSA may have.

They did, eventually, with dmix.

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