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Comment by kloud | Hacker News Reader

+1 I think such writing would find its audience.

What I would like to see is something that is to systemd what PipeWire is to PulseAudio.

Before PulseAudio getting audio to work properly was a struggle. PA introduced useful abstractions, but when it was rolled out it was a buggy mess. Eventually it got good over time. Then PipeWire comes in, and it does more with less. The transition was so smooth, I did not even realize it I had been running it for a while, just one day I noticed it in the update logs.

systemd now works well enough, but it would be nice to get rid of that accumulated cruft.

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systemd and pulseaudio are by the same guy (avahi too). He just writes shit software that sort of works.

Also he has no regards for breaking userspace to the point of needing to get scolded by Linus. But some ideas are good and there is a lot of pioneering work that moves the needle. The trajectories of PulseAudio and systemd are similar, it just needs cleaning up. PulseAudio got fixed up by PipeWire, whereas systemd is at the point of lifecycle yet to reach that stage.

Afaik one of the main problem with the software of his is that it tends to sacrifice ergonomics in the 99% common cases for some obscure theoretical observation.

This is of course about tradeoffs and about the complexities of the problems you're solving, but his software is full of choices that only make sense if you priorize elegant code over elegant software only to then grow into something that is neither.

Lennart worked at Red Hat when he was developing systemd. Red Hat's largest customers often have wacky, weird requirements that you would have never thought of unless you were in that specific customer's situation.

Good point.

It doesn't mean the requirements and solutions aren't wacky, weird, or inscrutable though.

Yeah sure, I didn't intend to paint it as if these problems were easy to solve. They are not.

Didn't take it that way, I was trying not to minimize the opposite point of view. systemd is a riddle wrapped up in a big ball of wtf.

There's a podcast [1], which features him as a guest to talk about Linux in general. The main impressions I got from it: he is very confused about what UNIX is and he apparently despises UNIX.

I think he's well suited for his new employer (Microsoft).

[1] (in German) https://cre.fm/cre209-das-linux-system

The reason that PulseAudio did not work at first (and PipeWire worked out of the gate), is that PulseAudio and PipeWire use a lot of relatively newer kernel audio APIs that previous sound daemons did not use. Therefore driver implementations of those APIs were untested and hence buggy when PulseAudio first started using them.

When people say "PulseAudio is not a broken mess anymore", what they really mean is "my audio driver is not a broken mess anymore".

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