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Things I can’t do on my Ubuntu machine: - play audio - record audio - anything that relies on the above The author mentioned a common retort which is “you’r

by natch 5y ago

Things I can’t do on my Ubuntu machine: - play audio - record audio - anything that relies on the above The author mentioned a common retort which is “you’re doing it wrong”… well in my case I most definitely am doing it wrong. I don’t know how, exactly, but no doubt. But point is with macOS I can do nothing and it still just works. Who knows what I would have to do to get my Ubuntu machine to work. And it might be the machine, not the OS. Another reason bundling the machine and the OS together such that they just work is a good idea. I’ll take working audio over any of the author’s examples any day. And if your audio works on Ubuntu, great! That just doesn’t help me though. So Mac it is, as far as audio is concerned.

smoldesu 5y ago
Pipewire has mostly fixed Linux audio, once it's fully adopted I expect these concerns to go away. I'll agree though, even as a Linux user: audio sucks. For the past 20 years there's been like 3 different audio standards, each with their own advantages/flaws and nobody settled on one that we'd just all use. That's why pipewire exists: you can now mix-and-match between all of these systems and get a CoreAudio-like experience out-of-the-box. It's very nice, and I can genuinely not think of a single use-case that couldn't be served by it. You wanna screenrecord while recording from YouTube into your DAW while playing a game and livestreaming it all at the same time? PipeWire has you covered. The real shame is window servers. Both xorg and Wayland are some of the worst software I've ever used, and neither of them even come close to Quartz on MacOS. It's the main thing that keeps Linux feeling like a server OS running desktop software; neither of these solutions are complete or stable. There's no replacement for them either, Wayland took more than 10 years to build and it's still awful and works on a small handful of software. Desktop Linux will always be a niche experience. As someone who fits into that niche, I absolutely love it, but I'm not mad or confused when people say they simply don't like it; I get it, I really do.

by natch 5y ago

smoldesu 5y ago

Pipewire has mostly fixed Linux audio, once it's fully adopted I expect these concerns to go away. I'll agree though, even as a Linux user: audio sucks. For the past 20 years there's been like 3 different audio standards, each with their own advantages/flaws and nobody settled on one that we'd just all use. That's why pipewire exists: you can now mix-and-match between all of these systems and get a CoreAudio-like experience out-of-the-box. It's very nice, and I can genuinely not think of a single use-case that couldn't be served by it. You wanna screenrecord while recording from YouTube into your DAW while playing a game and livestreaming it all at the same time? PipeWire has you covered. The real shame is window servers. Both xorg and Wayland are some of the worst software I've ever used, and neither of them even come close to Quartz on MacOS. It's the main thing that keeps Linux feeling like a server OS running desktop software; neither of these solutions are complete or stable. There's no replacement for them either, Wayland took more than 10 years to build and it's still awful and works on a small handful of software. Desktop Linux will always be a niche experience. As someone who fits into that niche, I absolutely love it, but I'm not mad or confused when people say they simply don't like it; I get it, I really do.