4 ms·

Redhat's influence, his employer, does end up forcing other distros, as Redhat is the biggest influencer on linux land

by UserIsUnused 7y ago

teekert 7y ago
Influencer indeed, not forcer.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  No, it's not influence. Their devs essentially started removing support for other init systems in GNOME under the pretense of reducing maintenance load. It has to be pretty strongly changed to actually work with something else and then incompletely. (Read Gentoo patch list.) It's the same story with other sound servers than Pulseaudio, including pure ALSA.
  - BurningCycles 7y ago
    >Their devs essentially started removing support for other init systems in GNOME under the pretense of reducing maintenance load. I'm no fan of systemd, but this is nonsense. Of course it reduces maintenance load. And AFAIK GNOME relies on components in the systemd ecosystem, which can be implemented by a 3rd party in a compatible manner. And you are not forced to use GNOME, or KDE, or Xfce, or any of the wide range of window managers etc. Also Pulseaudio runs on TOP of ALSA, and what other sound servers are you referring to ? Bottom line is, beggars can't be choosers. If the maintainers of your preferred distro chooses a technology you do not like, you can vote with your feet, and if all distros opt for that same technology, you simply have to accept that. I have no doubt something better than systemd will come along in the next 4-8 years and start replacing it, and then we will have the same discussions with people who have grown accustomed to systemd arguing against this new PUSH of a 'new and shiny' thing.
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      Yes, not maintaining currently working code is less maintenance load. Obviously. Replacing it with new code in some random new incomplete daemon. GNOME until some later v3 (check, likely 3.4) didn't rely on systemd, there were supported sane replacements for e.g. account management. The other sound servers have a long history, starting with ancient esound (eh) through Alsa dmix and devices (gnome 2 had a configuration app even), Arts for KDE, JACK and a few less notable. GNOME used to properly support everything gstreamer did, which is a lot. It's not about maintainers nor reduced load. It's about RedHat being the maintainers and GNOME being junk since. Hence all the GNOME 2 updates, like Cinnamon and MATE. Distro maintainers unfortunately have to support GNOME 3 too as it's not unpopular, and then they'd have to support two versions of udev and init system and potentially write dbus shims like Gentoo does. It's quite some work. Work RedHat (esp. Pottering) forced onto others. Like work they forced into ALSA devs to make compatibility shims for non-mmap cards because certain PulseAudio did not care to use full ALSA API and required rewinding, instead of handling it like say JACK or Arts. This also prevents it from running properly on top of dmix. It really wants direct hardware, making your "on ALSA" point moot. Even JACK can run on it but it's not good for latency. It's a pattern. Lazy RedHat devs integrating things because it's easier for them without any consideration of others. Because they can. Dropping GNOME 3 is an extremely tough decision for big distributions, mostly not possible.

Redhat's influence, his employer, does end up forcing other distros, as Redhat is the biggest influencer on linux land

teekert 7y ago

Influencer indeed, not forcer.

AstralStorm 7y ago
No, it's not influence. Their devs essentially started removing support for other init systems in GNOME under the pretense of reducing maintenance load. It has to be pretty strongly changed to actually work with something else and then incompletely. (Read Gentoo patch list.) It's the same story with other sound servers than Pulseaudio, including pure ALSA.
- BurningCycles 7y ago
  >Their devs essentially started removing support for other init systems in GNOME under the pretense of reducing maintenance load. I'm no fan of systemd, but this is nonsense. Of course it reduces maintenance load. And AFAIK GNOME relies on components in the systemd ecosystem, which can be implemented by a 3rd party in a compatible manner. And you are not forced to use GNOME, or KDE, or Xfce, or any of the wide range of window managers etc. Also Pulseaudio runs on TOP of ALSA, and what other sound servers are you referring to ? Bottom line is, beggars can't be choosers. If the maintainers of your preferred distro chooses a technology you do not like, you can vote with your feet, and if all distros opt for that same technology, you simply have to accept that. I have no doubt something better than systemd will come along in the next 4-8 years and start replacing it, and then we will have the same discussions with people who have grown accustomed to systemd arguing against this new PUSH of a 'new and shiny' thing.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Yes, not maintaining currently working code is less maintenance load. Obviously. Replacing it with new code in some random new incomplete daemon. GNOME until some later v3 (check, likely 3.4) didn't rely on systemd, there were supported sane replacements for e.g. account management. The other sound servers have a long history, starting with ancient esound (eh) through Alsa dmix and devices (gnome 2 had a configuration app even), Arts for KDE, JACK and a few less notable. GNOME used to properly support everything gstreamer did, which is a lot. It's not about maintainers nor reduced load. It's about RedHat being the maintainers and GNOME being junk since. Hence all the GNOME 2 updates, like Cinnamon and MATE. Distro maintainers unfortunately have to support GNOME 3 too as it's not unpopular, and then they'd have to support two versions of udev and init system and potentially write dbus shims like Gentoo does. It's quite some work. Work RedHat (esp. Pottering) forced onto others. Like work they forced into ALSA devs to make compatibility shims for non-mmap cards because certain PulseAudio did not care to use full ALSA API and required rewinding, instead of handling it like say JACK or Arts. This also prevents it from running properly on top of dmix. It really wants direct hardware, making your "on ALSA" point moot. Even JACK can run on it but it's not good for latency. It's a pattern. Lazy RedHat devs integrating things because it's easier for them without any consideration of others. Because they can. Dropping GNOME 3 is an extremely tough decision for big distributions, mostly not possible.