11 ms·

It really is amalgamation of "whatever works fine as default on Lennart Poettering's private laptop". Hell, I still remember where "sec, I need to restart pulse

by ilyt 4y ago

It really is amalgamation of "whatever works fine as default on Lennart Poettering's private laptop". Hell, I still remember where "sec, I need to restart pulseaudio" was common thing I've read from my colleagues any time they needed to run some voice chat app... ALSA before that wasn't great either, the fact you didn't get any software mixing by default and needed to fuck around with dmix gave way to endless problems with various software, and the fact dmix was still working subtly different than "real" device also reared its ugly head in many "pro audio" apps.

dijit 4y ago
> ALSA before that wasn't great either, the fact you didn't get any software mixing by default It was being developed. People jumped on Pulseaudio and made it the default before it was finished because the ALSA contributers wanted to do it in a way that was either going to work for embedded or be optional in a reasonable way, IE; they were trying to do it right, took too long, and it got replaced with something much worse that did the job. Which, happens unfortunately frequently.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Similar story for how ALSA came to exist, really. Linux folks looked at OSS and said "this blows, let's replace it" and made ALSA. The FreeBSD folks looked at OSS and said "this blows, let's fix it". And did. And they're still on that while Linux is headed into its third major audio shake-up in the same time span (OSS -> ALSA -> PulseAudio -> PipeWire).
  - 0x457 4y ago
    Saying this as FreeBSD user: FreeBSD didn't switch this many times because no one is working on a new thing. The community is already small, the community of people using it on desktop is even smaller. Developers that can work on any of this - almost doesn't exist at all. Corporate money and contribution go to: storage, network, scheduler. Anything desktop related doesn't get any love. I bet that PR for EoL drm-kmod from linux still not merged.
72deluxe 4y ago
I could never understand why it was adopted. It was written to solve problems that nobody faced. I still remember Fedora Core 2 (??) being useless with audio due to them adopting PulseAudio. I try to minimise my contact with any of Poettering's software as much as possible since then.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I still remember being shocked at the bloat. It sat there eating something like 100x the memory of my entire sound stack before that (granted, easy to hit a large multiple when the baseline is very low), with pretty frequent CPU spikes, all while no sound was playing. WT actual F. And the CPU use was straight-up vulgar when it was actually doing anything. It was then that I decided whoever was responsible for it had no software-architectural taste whatsoever. I didn't yet know his name. His work since then hasn't changed my mind.

by ilyt 4y ago

dijit 4y ago

> ALSA before that wasn't great either, the fact you didn't get any software mixing by default It was being developed. People jumped on Pulseaudio and made it the default before it was finished because the ALSA contributers wanted to do it in a way that was either going to work for embedded or be optional in a reasonable way, IE; they were trying to do it right, took too long, and it got replaced with something much worse that did the job. Which, happens unfortunately frequently.

yamtaddle 4y ago
Similar story for how ALSA came to exist, really. Linux folks looked at OSS and said "this blows, let's replace it" and made ALSA. The FreeBSD folks looked at OSS and said "this blows, let's fix it". And did. And they're still on that while Linux is headed into its third major audio shake-up in the same time span (OSS -> ALSA -> PulseAudio -> PipeWire).
- 0x457 4y ago
  Saying this as FreeBSD user: FreeBSD didn't switch this many times because no one is working on a new thing. The community is already small, the community of people using it on desktop is even smaller. Developers that can work on any of this - almost doesn't exist at all. Corporate money and contribution go to: storage, network, scheduler. Anything desktop related doesn't get any love. I bet that PR for EoL drm-kmod from linux still not merged.

72deluxe 4y ago

I could never understand why it was adopted. It was written to solve problems that nobody faced. I still remember Fedora Core 2 (??) being useless with audio due to them adopting PulseAudio. I try to minimise my contact with any of Poettering's software as much as possible since then.

yamtaddle 4y ago
I still remember being shocked at the bloat. It sat there eating something like 100x the memory of my entire sound stack before that (granted, easy to hit a large multiple when the baseline is very low), with pretty frequent CPU spikes, all while no sound was playing. WT actual F. And the CPU use was straight-up vulgar when it was actually doing anything. It was then that I decided whoever was responsible for it had no software-architectural taste whatsoever. I didn't yet know his name. His work since then hasn't changed my mind.