8 ms·

He can easily hop ship wherever he wants given the major impact he's landed in PulseAudio, Systemd and elsewhere. His design decisions have certainly been contr

He can easily hop ship wherever he wants given the major impact he's landed in PulseAudio, Systemd and elsewhere. His design decisions have certainly been controversial but his impact is certainly agreed upon.

traverseda 4y ago
I think that Redhat gave him a privileged position to make that impact from, and I'm not sure that he'll make a similar impact without similar political backing, but I suppose time will tell.
- darthrupert 4y ago
  It's a fact of life that people get old and thus become less effective at making great changes. I cannot think of many counter-examples from our field.
  - robonerd 4y ago
    Sickboy's Philosophy of Life. We all get old and cannae hack it anymore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a94jraWNG-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a94jraWNG-g
zh3 4y ago
Eh, Pulseaudio. One of those things that on the rare occasion it's worked out of the box it's then broken with one step of the beaten path. Evidently it seems to work for many people, the trouble it's caused has far outweighed any benefit (plus I know quite a few people dropped firefox for chrome when it went pulseaudio only - is that still the case?).
- klodolph 4y ago
  I don't know what kind of audio configurations you've lived with. I do remember when PulseAudio seemed to be the source of many problems, but this was over a decade ago. One of the big problems is that the Linux audio stack is built out of components that rely on assumptions about the next lower level of the stack that are often untrue. You might assume that your audio hardware has a volume control, assume it can perform mixing, assume it doesn't change configuration, assume there's only one user, assume (or want to assume) it has a specific sample rate, etc. PulseAudio papers over this stuff and deals with permissions, so your applications can actually work. If you have sufficiently boring PC hardware and sufficiently boring use cases, the audio will just kind of work anyway, without PulseAudio. Linux audio has more than its fair share of problems in the stack, but in my experience, PulseAudio is more of a solver of problems and less of a source of problems.
  - robonerd 4y ago
    > If you have sufficiently boring PC hardware and sufficiently boring use cases, the audio will just kind of work anyway, without PulseAudio. Introducing breakage, complexity and general fragility to the common case, which was previously working fine, will obviously make a whole lot of people upset.
    - esarbe 4y ago
      Linux audio was never working fine. It was a mess of broken drivers and incompatible implementations. I cannot fathom how people are able to repress the memory of how bad Linux audio was before pulseaudio.
      - robonerd 4y ago
        I never experienced any trouble with audio in linux before pulseaudio. There is no memory repression here; only gaslighting from you, telling me I experienced something I didn't.
        Crysstalis 4y ago
        Have you by chance checked the bug tracker, or reported this bug, or attempted to do any debugging to find the root cause?
        JetSpiegel 4y ago
        That would required the "bug" to exist in the first place.
        robonerd 4y ago
        robonerd 4y ago
        "Why didn't you just become a pulseaudio dev if you hate pulseaudio so much" Get fucking real, I have better things to do with my life than waste time ingratiating myself with the likes of pusleaudio devs. "Audio stopped working" describes hundreds if not thousands of pulseaudio bugs, do you really expect frustrated end users to drop everything else going on in their life and spend weeks learning the ropes of this shit? Get real.
- kyruzic 4y ago
  Pulseaudio is one of the absolute best parts of Linux. Have fun routing audio from one stream to one device and another stream to a different device on Windows or macos!
  - robonerd 4y ago
    > Have fun routing audio from one stream to one device and another stream to a different device on Windows or macos! I can do that with pulseaudio, but it's not fun.
    - seba_dos1 4y ago
      I use to do that quite often with Pulse, and on Plasma it's just a matter of drag'n'drop in audio systray applet.
      - robonerd 4y ago
        Okay, I have two computers on my LAN right now, one running OpenSUSE with KDE and Pulseaudio, the other with Debian and Pulseaudio. I want to send my audio from the OpenSUSE computer to the Debian computer. What do I drag, and to where? There's nothing dragable in my systray that even mentions the Debian computer. I'm quite sure this process starts with me writing some config files on both of these computers. That's how it worked every other time I've tried these sort of things with Pulseaudio. These sort of tricks are possible for techies to do with Pulseaudio, but for the proverbial grandmother user they may as well not exist because the system as a whole certainly isn't going to make it easy.
        seba_dos1 4y ago
        > I'm quite sure this process starts with me writing some config files on both of these computers. So don't be so sure ;) You just tick a checkbox in paprefs to enable networking (which is perfectly reasonable, as in most cases you don't want to have it enabled by default), and that's it. It finds the other PC via zeroconf and it shows up as a regular output device. Depending on distro you use, you may need to install PulseAudio's zeroconf module and make sure Avahi is running, but a properly configured desktop distro will have all that either by default or a single package installation away these days.
iasay 4y ago
> His design decisions have certainly been controversial but his impact is certainly agreed upon. I can think of many historical figures that fit that description.
gnulinux 4y ago
I've been using linux for decades and by far -- by a HUGE margin -- PulseAudio has been the most annoying and broken thing I had to use. I'm still baffled by how something as basic as audio output can be eternally fragile in linux! And before you say you might have quirky hardware: my daily laptop is a Lenovo X1 Carbon 7th gen. Now (since 2021) I use PipeWire and tbh do not know to what extent pulseaudio codebase is still utilized in my system but it all just works now.
- corrral 4y ago
  Ubuntu's adoption of it was what pushed me away from Desktop Linux, after about a decade of being mainly a Linux user. Suddenly the one thing that had actually Just Worked for almost that entire decade, became unstable, unpredictable, and, to add insult to injury, ate tons of memory and processor cycles for unclear and likely unjustifiable reasons.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    I’m sorry but I really can’t take any such take seriously. If you mean alsa, it may have worked (though let’s be honest, there was a painstakingly high amount of sound hardware that simply wasn’t supported well for decades, which was fixed over a similar timeline. “Linux sound bad” memes have been around way before PA became a thing), but the thing is, it is not adequate in itself for a typical desktop usecase, simple as that.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  The only way Pulseaudio is palatable is by using the Pulseaudio sink in Jack.
  - sam_lowry_ 4y ago
    I settled on alsa and dmix as the ultimate solutuon.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
na85 4y ago
>He can easily hop ship wherever he wants given the major impact he's landed I don't know about that. Talent alone doesn't make someone a good fit for a team. Would you want to work alongside Poettering? Or de Raadt? I wouldn't, and that means I wouldn't hire them either.
hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
I'm not sure about SystemD, but PulseAudio is definitely a piece of software I wouldn't brag about. If you work on an existing codebase and do what your employer says, that's one thing, but when you have the rare freedom to design a system from the ground up, I expect it to do at least one thing: to run.

traverseda 4y ago

I think that Redhat gave him a privileged position to make that impact from, and I'm not sure that he'll make a similar impact without similar political backing, but I suppose time will tell.

darthrupert 4y ago
It's a fact of life that people get old and thus become less effective at making great changes. I cannot think of many counter-examples from our field.
- robonerd 4y ago
  Sickboy's Philosophy of Life. We all get old and cannae hack it anymore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a94jraWNG-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a94jraWNG-g

zh3 4y ago

Eh, Pulseaudio. One of those things that on the rare occasion it's worked out of the box it's then broken with one step of the beaten path. Evidently it seems to work for many people, the trouble it's caused has far outweighed any benefit (plus I know quite a few people dropped firefox for chrome when it went pulseaudio only - is that still the case?).

klodolph 4y ago
I don't know what kind of audio configurations you've lived with. I do remember when PulseAudio seemed to be the source of many problems, but this was over a decade ago. One of the big problems is that the Linux audio stack is built out of components that rely on assumptions about the next lower level of the stack that are often untrue. You might assume that your audio hardware has a volume control, assume it can perform mixing, assume it doesn't change configuration, assume there's only one user, assume (or want to assume) it has a specific sample rate, etc. PulseAudio papers over this stuff and deals with permissions, so your applications can actually work. If you have sufficiently boring PC hardware and sufficiently boring use cases, the audio will just kind of work anyway, without PulseAudio. Linux audio has more than its fair share of problems in the stack, but in my experience, PulseAudio is more of a solver of problems and less of a source of problems.
- robonerd 4y ago
  > If you have sufficiently boring PC hardware and sufficiently boring use cases, the audio will just kind of work anyway, without PulseAudio. Introducing breakage, complexity and general fragility to the common case, which was previously working fine, will obviously make a whole lot of people upset.
  - esarbe 4y ago
    Linux audio was never working fine. It was a mess of broken drivers and incompatible implementations. I cannot fathom how people are able to repress the memory of how bad Linux audio was before pulseaudio.
    - robonerd 4y ago
      I never experienced any trouble with audio in linux before pulseaudio. There is no memory repression here; only gaslighting from you, telling me I experienced something I didn't.
      - Crysstalis 4y ago
        Have you by chance checked the bug tracker, or reported this bug, or attempted to do any debugging to find the root cause?
        JetSpiegel 4y ago
        That would required the "bug" to exist in the first place.
        robonerd 4y ago
        robonerd 4y ago
        "Why didn't you just become a pulseaudio dev if you hate pulseaudio so much" Get fucking real, I have better things to do with my life than waste time ingratiating myself with the likes of pusleaudio devs. "Audio stopped working" describes hundreds if not thousands of pulseaudio bugs, do you really expect frustrated end users to drop everything else going on in their life and spend weeks learning the ropes of this shit? Get real.
kyruzic 4y ago
Pulseaudio is one of the absolute best parts of Linux. Have fun routing audio from one stream to one device and another stream to a different device on Windows or macos!
- robonerd 4y ago
  > Have fun routing audio from one stream to one device and another stream to a different device on Windows or macos! I can do that with pulseaudio, but it's not fun.
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    I use to do that quite often with Pulse, and on Plasma it's just a matter of drag'n'drop in audio systray applet.
    - robonerd 4y ago
      Okay, I have two computers on my LAN right now, one running OpenSUSE with KDE and Pulseaudio, the other with Debian and Pulseaudio. I want to send my audio from the OpenSUSE computer to the Debian computer. What do I drag, and to where? There's nothing dragable in my systray that even mentions the Debian computer. I'm quite sure this process starts with me writing some config files on both of these computers. That's how it worked every other time I've tried these sort of things with Pulseaudio. These sort of tricks are possible for techies to do with Pulseaudio, but for the proverbial grandmother user they may as well not exist because the system as a whole certainly isn't going to make it easy.
      - seba_dos1 4y ago
        > I'm quite sure this process starts with me writing some config files on both of these computers. So don't be so sure ;) You just tick a checkbox in paprefs to enable networking (which is perfectly reasonable, as in most cases you don't want to have it enabled by default), and that's it. It finds the other PC via zeroconf and it shows up as a regular output device. Depending on distro you use, you may need to install PulseAudio's zeroconf module and make sure Avahi is running, but a properly configured desktop distro will have all that either by default or a single package installation away these days.

iasay 4y ago

> His design decisions have certainly been controversial but his impact is certainly agreed upon. I can think of many historical figures that fit that description.

gnulinux 4y ago

I've been using linux for decades and by far -- by a HUGE margin -- PulseAudio has been the most annoying and broken thing I had to use. I'm still baffled by how something as basic as audio output can be eternally fragile in linux! And before you say you might have quirky hardware: my daily laptop is a Lenovo X1 Carbon 7th gen. Now (since 2021) I use PipeWire and tbh do not know to what extent pulseaudio codebase is still utilized in my system but it all just works now.

corrral 4y ago
Ubuntu's adoption of it was what pushed me away from Desktop Linux, after about a decade of being mainly a Linux user. Suddenly the one thing that had actually Just Worked for almost that entire decade, became unstable, unpredictable, and, to add insult to injury, ate tons of memory and processor cycles for unclear and likely unjustifiable reasons.
- kaba0 4y ago
  I’m sorry but I really can’t take any such take seriously. If you mean alsa, it may have worked (though let’s be honest, there was a painstakingly high amount of sound hardware that simply wasn’t supported well for decades, which was fixed over a similar timeline. “Linux sound bad” memes have been around way before PA became a thing), but the thing is, it is not adequate in itself for a typical desktop usecase, simple as that.
jacquesm 4y ago
The only way Pulseaudio is palatable is by using the Pulseaudio sink in Jack.
- sam_lowry_ 4y ago
  I settled on alsa and dmix as the ultimate solutuon.
  - jacquesm 4y ago

na85 4y ago

>He can easily hop ship wherever he wants given the major impact he's landed I don't know about that. Talent alone doesn't make someone a good fit for a team. Would you want to work alongside Poettering? Or de Raadt? I wouldn't, and that means I wouldn't hire them either.

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago

I'm not sure about SystemD, but PulseAudio is definitely a piece of software I wouldn't brag about. If you work on an existing codebase and do what your employer says, that's one thing, but when you have the rare freedom to design a system from the ground up, I expect it to do at least one thing: to run.