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Comment by danielweber | Hacker News Reader

Yes, sound is still a problem. I tried to change window managers on My Ubuntu desktop and totally lost sound.

I am well past the age of my life where there is anything productive about spending hours of my day futzing with sound drivers. I know how drivers work. I'm not becoming any better at working with computers by deciphering this year's way of sound not working with Linux.

(It did work out of the box. I was getting sick and tired of Unity and tried to put something else in place. Everything went to shit at that point. Now I am back at Unity.)

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  | I tried to change window managers

What you probably did was switch from a 'desktop environment' to (just) a window manager. A desktop environment includes many processes that are started on login and run in the background (e.g. dbus, pulse-audio, ssh-agent, gpg-agent, gnome-power-manager, etc).

"I tried to change window managers on My Ubuntu desktop and totally lost sound." - Once you do something as drastic as changing the default window manager on a distro you are largely on your own.

In the past switching window managers would leave you without a network connection because Network Manager applet would begin after you login into gnome. However this appears to be fixed and was not an issue the last few times I tried.

Having said all of this, I wonder if its reasonable to expect a distro to handle the situation where you completely swap out the user land that they ship with. The equivalent does not exist for windows / osx.

Thats a huge failure of abstraction. File a bug. A window manager should manage windows not sound. Someone outside the linux community would have no idea that the thing that controls title bars also happens to control sound.

On Debian with ratpoison / awesome / KDE / probably others it "just works" and you don't control your sound with your window or whatever.

It would be like configuring your mouse by modifying your network settings or configuring your video card by modifying your joystick/gamepad settings.

>A window manager should manage windows not sound

Here in the real world a desktop environment like Unity is a whoe lot more than just a window manager. It includes system management and configuration GUI components, including preferences panes and utilities to control audio functions. Unity is trying to provide a comprehensive user interface to the entire OS, or as much of it as possible.

>Here in the real world a desktop environment like Unity is a whole lot more than just a window manager.

That is why we distinguish between 'window manager' (only manages windows) and 'desktop environment' (a whole lot more).

Exactly. Unity is a desktop environment, not a window manager.

And look what an epic failure that paradigm has turned into. Much like swiss army knives have ended production of all other tools, etc. No matter how good of a job you do going down the wrong path, fundamentally, you're still going down the wrong path.

I'm, sorry, are you suggesting that integrated GUI environemnts such as MacOSX, Windows (and I'd argue iOS and Android too), are epic failures? In contrast of course to the awesome, eternal empire of success that is the Linux desktop?

The epic fail is in some misguided areas of linux land tying the GUI background image renderer and program launcher to the sound driver such that they (supposedly) cannot be separated in practice although there is no technical reason why they shouldn't be separated. And that's considered anything other than an epic fail.

It would be like demanding if I install grub bootloader, the plain text grub config file may ONLY be edited by vi. Why not nano or emacs? Well we're trying to implement a consistent user experience by limiting user choice and ...

Its a creeping windows "all in one" design model, which is mostly awful. The opposite of the unix "do one thing really well" model.

If android did something that dumb I'd call it out, although I can't think of any example of equal fail level. Imagine if you're only allowed to edit the screen brightness (or autodetect screen brightness), if and only if, you install dogcatcher podcast player, because hey, doggcatcher is awesome, who can disagree with that. And if you remove ConnectBot app then the systemwide GPS/location system completely stops working, because, hey, why not? "I replaced my cell phone battery and that made the volume buttons stop working, because it makes logical sense to bind the two concepts together"

> Its a creeping windows "all in one" design model, which is mostly awful. The opposite of the unix "do one thing really well" model.

I always find it funny that people only pick on Windows, when this is the model followed by any computer system outside the UNIX world.

Maybe lack of experience with computing in the 80-90's?

> Once you do something as drastic as changing the default window manager on a distro you are largely on your own.

That's crazy. When did Linux get so _fragile_?

A windows manager is the application that handles windows management. Applications (browser, word processor) don't care what WM is running, and neither should utilities.

Changing a WM is strait forward. Exit, run 'xwmconfig', then startx and I'm back in.

Maybe Slack has me spoiled, or something - are the so-called modern Linuxi really so crufty that changing a WM cripples the host?

Modern Desktop Linux is very fragile because everything has to be configured and managed automatically. You haven't been able to startx without a lot of reconfiguring for years.

Ideally you want a full Desktop environment, but at a minimum you need a session manager (for auto-starting everything else, communicating with the * kits, * buses, * agents, and * managers for device integration, etc . . .), a settings daemon (stores settings for applications that care to use it, might be more than one of these - Xfce has two or three at the moment), a desktop manager (like a WM but for desktops), a window manager, a compositor (for special effects, might be part of the WM), plus miscellaneous bars, launchers, and plugins for same.

It's perfectly possible to split all this up, but then you have to make all the parts compatible. Most distros want more integration, not less.

> Modern Desktop Linux is very fragile because everything has to be configured and managed automatically. You haven't been able to startx without a lot of reconfiguring for years.

I guess I don't know what a Desktop Linux from a hole in the ground.

I use Slackware on my desktop, and it works just fine. I can switch WM using startx.

I will allow that installing Slack is not a pointy-clicky exercise, and if the application isn't in Slack's package manager you'll need to compile from source but .. it's not that complicated.

I hope you know what Desktop Linux is. I don't care that you don't use a Desktop distro because I use Gentoo and XMonad and am generally quite comfortable with both.

As for complicated well, that depends - complicated for who? There are a lot of people who couldn't configure && make && make install if their lives depended on it. Even if their lives literally depended on it. That's not necessarily their fault, but there you are nonetheless.

> I hope you know what Desktop Linux is.

Until yesterday, if asked, I would have said 'A linux for end users'.

And if asked for an example I would have pointed at my laptops running Slack/Enlightenment and said 'like that'.

Maybe it's where I'm at: the only people I know who run Linux are guys who aren't above compiling from source when needed.

Apparently I don't run desktop Linux either because I have no problems editing settings with a text editor, nor do I drool on myself when it comes to reading documentation.

>Modern Desktop Linux is very fragile because everything has to be configured and managed automatically. You haven't been able to startx without a lot of reconfiguring for years.

What distribution does not support startx out of the box. If you boot into terminal (or kill the X service), then startx should just do whatever the system does to start the X server anyway.

startx is a shell script. The vast majority of distributions don't use it at all - they use a display manager that then does most, but not necessarily all, of what the xinit system does (plus some extras, depending on the DM).

startx from a VT should give you an X server. You can get from there to a standard session (minus the DM) by setting the appropriate environment variables and making sure the right session manager is executed.

I don't call that 'no configuration' though. And if you want to startx into Fluxbox you also have to make sure that all of the aforementioned services are run (unless you're totally abandoning your Desktop environment, in which case this whole conversation is pointless).

I turned my back on 'Modern Desktop Linux' a few years ago and haven't looked back since.

In my .profile I have: # if logging into tty6 startx if [ -z "$DISPLAY" ] && [ $(tty) = /dev/tty6 ]; then startx ; fi

Then in my .xinitrc I have xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources eval $(gpg-agent --daemon) exec ck-launch-session dbus-launch awesome

My full desktop environment uses 116MB RAM at boot and everything works flawlessly.

When users expect everything to "just work", it means that automated configuration has to integrate with a ton of components, thus supporting alternatives for every section of the stack becomes a huge endeavour.

Then all the answers about "Unity isn't so bad, because you can switch away from it" become void.

There are no magic elves and fairies lower down in the stack.

Reliable user experiences come from

a) Reducing degrees of freedom - remove the number of things the end user can tweak / change (the mac way)

b) Monopolistic fiat - Publishing standards and strong arming vendors into supporting those (the wintel way)

Linux tries to approximate reliability using a "many eyes make bugs shallow" approach. However this kind of reliability is stochastic. Think of it as a gaussian centered around the defaults that ship out of the box on hardware that is fairly commonplace. The more you push your end config away from that center the more likely it is that you will have a suboptimal experience.

You can switch away from it, you just can't do it with "apt-get install <new window manager>". Try a distro that is designed for the WM you want to use.

I agree that in an ideal world installing a new WM would "Just Work", but we don't live in that world. Try installing a new WM on OS X or Windows and see how well things go. Not trashing those operating systems, just pointing out that GNU/Linux does, indeed, offer more choice. The fact that the choices are not ideally convenient to switch between is really a fairly minor issue.

You have to be joking me. "A distro that is designed for the WM you want to use"?

What does that even mean? That I have to have a special twm distro? Or an fvwm2 distribution? tvtwm was always my favorite window manager, but I seem to recall it needed some patches to really be perfect. Do I have to find somebody to build me my own distribution that has those patches?

A Window Manager manages windows, like the name suggests; it doesn't manage networking or sound. And if it does, then the whole system has failed to produce decent engineering boundaries and we should revert a few releases to when things had the correct levels of abstraction.

I think part of the problem here is that window managers and desktop environments are being conflated.

Desktop environments are sometimes set up to handle sound or networking.

I agree that it's not a good design, but I don't think it's as ridiculous for a desktop environment to handle these things as it is for a window manager to do so.

Apologies, I was very much conflating WM and DE. However, you mentioned Unity, which is really both (Unity itself is a DE but it brings its own WM to the table and assumes that you will use it). My point was that if you insist on extensive customization, you should be prepared to do some work. If you don't want to spend a lot of time fiddling (I know I don't) then you find a distro that does things the way you want them done and you use it. Things are the same in the Windows and Mac world, for better or worse.

You have to either get comfortable living in someone elses reality or accept the burden/freedom of creating your own reality.

I think GP's point was that you either 'deal with it' or find someone else (a packager for a distribution) to deal with it on your behalf, if you are having issues then a distribution is a possible solution.

> What does that even mean?

I think it means 'use Slackware'.

My experience is, don't use Ubuntu if you don't want the defaults they ship. It's not meant to be customizable.

I'd recommend Arch Linux. It just makes sense.

To summarize:

1. Remove your entire desktop environment,

2. Install just a window manager,

3. Now you don't have any program handling your sound, you just removed it, remember? (see (1) for reference),

4. Post on HN: "Yes, sound is still a problem."

KDE doesn't provide sound, just like KDE doesn't provide graphics drivers. I'm not sure why you feel sound support should be a function of the desktop environment.

My opinion on what should be a part of what is irrelevant.

My post was regarding the fact that people blame Linux when the real problem is their own lack of understanding.

A good answer to the original question would be: "Sound is not a problem in Linux. However, compared to other operating systems, it might require additional understanding of the way things work, especially if you want to customize your system. This requirement of knowledge is a problem in distributions like Ubuntu - where the user base is 'everyday people'."

KDE has Phonon. KDE doesn't have sound drivers, but it should have a mixer, it does have Phonon, etc.

Phonon is not a mixer. Phonon is essentially a built-in adapter layer over whatever audio driver and media decoder libraries you already have.

It's a little more complex nowadays as it was substantially modified to be a good PulseAudio citizen when running with PulseAudio, but Phonon doesn't talk to hardware, it talks to sound libraries such as VLC, gstreamer, or PulseAudio.

Ubuntu 12.04: I managed to have Unity and XFCE working as alternative 'sessions' along with DWM (with a .desktop file pointing at a start up script for the latter). I recollect some issues about different sound applets changing configs but sound would work under all three sessions.

I now use an Ubuntustudio install (13.04 with the default XFCE desktop). Sound just works, and detected my three sound output devices fine, and allows me to choose which one to use.

I quite like Unity but the bugs around LibreOffice global menu integration in 13.04 (with the resulting loss of highlighting of menu choices and the lack of 'accelerator key' menu selection) means I'm sitting this release out.

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