14 ms·

Linux is not about choice (2008)

301 points by emillon 13y ago

rayiner 13y ago
Epic: "But the chain of logic from 'Linux is about choice' to 'ship everything and let the user chose how they want their sound to not work' starts with fallacy and ends with disaster."
- ctdonath 13y ago
  Is sound still a problem on Linux? I realize the article is about 5 years old, but Linux has been around for a long time now, and sound is a really basic function I'd expect even obtuse geeks would want to solve. If it is still a problem, seems that's a definitive concise example of why Linux can't win the OS wars: some things must work, even if nobody wants the task of making it work; sometimes the only solution is to pay someone to do what nobody else wants to. ETA: Seems the answer is "yes".
  - kfk 13y ago
    No, sound is not a problem on Linux. I wonder if it ever was actually.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      It's always been a morass of competing, incompatible sound servers and APIs. Coding up anything more trivial than "beep" that works on a wide variety of distributions is painful.
      - EdiX 13y ago
        I don't even understand where this myths come from. Linux "the kernel" switched 15 years ago from OSS to ALSA for drivers, ALSA has been backwards compatible with OSS since. Gnome and KDE used to have their own user space sound servers (called EsounD and aRts) mostly to impement software mixing. They were completely replaced over 5 years ago by PulseAudio which is backwards compatible with both as well as applications using ALSA or OSS API. You could code an application using OSS API and be compatible with the first release of linux that had sound. What problems do you have exactly with your beeps?
        walls 13y ago
        You got lucky with your hardware; nothing more. Sound in Linux has been a living nightmare.
    - dscrd 13y ago
      It was a problem until Pulseaudio became good -- to my experience, that happened around the 2.0 release. And in a technical sense, it's still a problem, since ALSA contains so much useless complexity now that something like PA finally exists.
    - rlu 13y ago
      I have a netbook running xubuntu and when I connect it to a TV via HDMI, the sound continues to come from the netbook rather than from the TV. I googled for some fixes and couldn't find any quick fix that worked. This should "just work" in my opinion. It does in Windows and I'm sure OSX makes it just as painless.
      - VLM 13y ago
        What does "just work" mean? I have a mythtv frontend that squirts its video out a HDMI and audio out of a optical fiber to the surround sound system. It would drive me crazy if sound came out of the horrible TV speakers instead of the surround sound system. Two separate problems: 1) Default behavior where no change is the least surprising so at least that is OK. 2) Modify config where its obviously a fail if you can't figure out how to change the config. For whatever its worth, if you use ALSA, mythtv is ALSA compatible, so I merely go into "config" "audio" and mess around with audio options to my hearts content.
      - girvo 13y ago
        Doesn't in Windows, not on every laptop. Dell Studio 15 over here has the same problem on Windows 7. *shrugs, just wanted to add an anecdote.
      - parfe 13y ago
        Quickfix: Install pavucontrol. You can control on a per application basis which output to send audio to and move the stream on the fly. It doesn't "Just work" in windows. Windows will set a default and send all audio to that device without any controls for moving audio from one output to another. I have to restart my browser if I want to move from watching netflix on my monitor to my TV.
    - readme 13y ago
      It was. Before pulseaudio became the de-facto standard lots of people wouldn't even install an additional layer and use plain old alsa. Which meant you couldn't change the volumes of applications individually. You could have used artsd, esd, or something else, but the problem was that there shouldn't be 3 bad solutions to choose from. There should be one good solution. I remember installing redhat 9 and having to configure my sound card driver manually for an old creative soundblaster about 10 years ago. Further, back in those days it was not at all obvious how to get Linux to even play an MP3 (I know, this is an audio encoding and not related to the audio subsystem, but my point is: it was hard. These days you just install a mainstream distro and mp3 codec is there.) Linux has come a tremendous way in the last 10 years. Don't you remember the nightmares? Editing Xorg.conf, and such? But wait, I remember when it was still called XF86Config. /me shudders Today anyone can pop in an ubuntu dvd and be rolling in seconds with all hardware working (for a lot of systems*). Not long ago we had to research our hardware and hunt down solutions just to get a working machine.
      - teeja 13y ago
        Really. I just installed LM LXDE 11 on an ancient PC the other day that had a Soundblaster card covered in dust. Started up an MP3 and started plugging a 1/8" plug into holes on the back. When I got to the SB card, bingo. No install, no prefs ... just worked.
    - greyfade 13y ago
      For many years, the API incompatibility between OSS and ALSA made getting sound working at all was often a nightmarish task. There were a number of sound servers that tried to alleviate the problem, but they all used incompatible APIs and couldn't be used in parallel. It was, and is, awful. It's only very, very recently that PulseAudio has gotten to the point where it works most of the time, and it still has major unresolved problems. And there are still programs that use the OSS and ALSA APIs directly. While it does work fairly well, there are still incompatibility issues with programs that use Pulse. It's ludicrous to suggest that there are no problems.
  - npsimons 13y ago
    Linux sound hasn't been a problem for some of us for, oh, I don't know, well over 10 years (1999? 1998? I can't remember), and no, I'm not talking about "well I can write sound drivers, therefore it works for me, har har har!" I've never quite understood the problems people had, since I've always had Linux sound "just work" for me out of the box. Sure, back in the ISA bus days, you had to specify things like IRQs, but you had to do that on any OS where you had cards with hardware jumperable IRQs. Pulseaudio, I thankfully didn't have to deal with until it was actually working, but it still struck me as very much an NIH solution in search of a problem. I still remember the Enlightened Sound Daemon with software mixing, and thought it was nifty, but not a hard requirement.
    - pyre 13y ago
      I don't know about now, but running Linux on a ThinkPad X41 a couple of years ago with suspend-to-RAM. After a fresh boot a sleep-wake will work twice before the auto switching between speakers and headphones quits. Hibernating and waking will fix it only for one sleep-wake cycle. A full reboot would fix it so that it would work for two more sleep-wake cycles. I was fully willing to get my hands dirty with a little help (couldn't make heads or tails of the ALSA code), but Ubuntu just decided to shelf it into the 'leave it alone until everyone goes away' bucket on LaunchPad.
      - takluyver 13y ago
        I know how frustrating it can be when your bug isn't getting attention, but I've also been on the other side of that. It's not like Ubuntu (or any project) has hordes of developers who're just too lazy to tackle your bug: maybe not many people have that model, or don't tend to switch between speakers and headphones much. Maybe people couldn't reproduce the bug, or maybe just no-one could see how to fix it. There's a whole host of reasons why bugs don't get fixed, but it's rarely because the project as a whole 'just decided to shelve it'.
        pyre 13y ago
        I realize that there are reasons, and I'm not necessarily angry at Ubuntu, but I've dealt with these types of issues before and it's frustrating. I had the ALSA source code and was ready to attempt some hardware hacking, but: 1) The chipset was a common one, and the issue specific to this model. I had no idea how to proceed from there. 2) I couldn't make heads or tails out of the structure of the code, and what was happening (or why). I tried to find some sort of "this is happening here" where I could work out the rest from there, but couldn't find it. 3) I volunteered myself on the bug page, but there was never a response to it. 4) I've never hacked on kernel code (beyond compiling it from scratch 'back in the day') or done any hardware hacking, but I was willing to look at resources if people pointed me in the right direction. The project "as a whole" doesn't do anything with respect to specific bugs (there are exceptions), but the individuals that do take action, take that action on behalf of Ubuntu.
  - gue5t 13y ago
    It really isn't. Unless you have a card without a driver (exceedingly rare, though it's not uncommon to need a recent kernel to use recent hardware) ALSA pretty much Just Works. For complex features like streaming sound over the network you need PulseAudio, which due to its complexity takes more configuration and setup, but that's done out of the box on a fair number of distros. I don't know of any major software that requires OSS (though if I'm not mistaken it's still the preferred solution for BSD and therefore often available as an option), and only professional software uses JACK; users of JACK generally buy high-end hardware specifically for that purpose and know what they're doing. So there are three major components for different purposes. Core audio support is the domain of ALSA itself and Linux does a good job with it. PulseAudio provides advanced capabilities on top of the more basic/hardware-oriented functionality in ALSA, and JACK provides low-latency audio for realtime applications that need it (not games, only really audio processing equipment). With large amounts of work the partial redundancy between these components could be removed, but it's really not a big issue; for desktop or professional use getting things to work right isn't too hard.
    - peterwwillis 13y ago
      My sound card "mostly" worked when I installed Linux this year. But I spent a week researching to finally deduce how to modify my Skype and Alsa configs by hand to get Skype to use the microphone. I still don't remember what I did, though it had to do with setting a specific hardware type id. Nobody should ever have to do that.
      - dman 13y ago
        Which distro? What sound hardware?
      - bkor 13y ago
        Skype works out of the box with PulseAudio. No setup or settings required.
    - pmahoney 13y ago
      I actually find PulseAudio vs. JACK incredibly annoying. I like to play around with "professional" audio. I don't consider it professional, but more relevantly I like to play with certain apps that require JACK. It's certainly an RTFM thing, but last time I didn't know how to get PulseAudio to go away. I wrote a shell script to keep killing it in a loop (since it restarts itself) long enough to get JACK to take over. I know there must be better ways... Then inevitably once I've got JACK setup, I'll want to play some background music or watch some Flash video online without tearing down my JACK setup. Oops, does that audio player support JACK natively? Do I have that plugin installed? Can I run Pulse and have it direct output into JACK? None of this has worked smoothly in my experience. > users of JACK generally buy high-end hardware specifically for that purpose and know what they're doing This has not been my experience. I love to dabble, but apparently don't know what I'm doing.
  - yew 13y ago
    Sound isn't a problem for me. I just use ALSA and everything works (I haven't edited a single configuration file, actually). The sound-server wars are still ongoing but I've personally never had any cause to touch anything besides ALSA or OpenAL/SDL on the development side either. Other people may have different experiences.
  - Kaivo 13y ago
    I recently had trouble with my sound card on Arch Linux. Upon booting, once in a while, my default sound output would change and not work even after I'd edit it. Turns out it was my card model that wasn't supported and I just removed it. I've been working with the on-board output since then and everything is going just fine.
  - danielweber 13y ago
    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.)
    - dman 13y ago
      "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.
      - danielweber 13y ago
        Then all the answers about "Unity isn't so bad, because you can switch away from it" become void.
        glesica 13y ago
        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.
  - theon144 13y ago
    Not really. Regarding "usual" sound, I haven't had a problem for years now, and just a while ago I actually set up a fairly complex system with JACK for a music performance I was preparing (midi controllers each connected to a specific synth software, some of that straight to output, some of it to looper software first, along with the mic input, etc.) and I was surprised at how smooth it all went. I really think Linux left that behind in 2008 :)
  - ChuckMcM 13y ago
    The new challenge in the embedded community is device tree apparently. Lots of gripes about arbitrarily changing something that worked. Printing continues to be painful, as does direct to framebuffer graphics.
  - glesica 13y ago
    Linux is already winning the OS wars, it's called Android ;-) Just being snarky, I get your point. I've said this before, and I think it is important to keep in mind when discussing GNU/Linux: things work quite well... on supported hardware. The vast majority of tales of woe related to GNU/Linux and hardware end up coming down to incompatible hardware. This is a communication problem, not a technical problem. No one gets upset that OS X won't run on a random Acer netbook from 4 years ago because Apple has made clear that their OS is only supposed to work on their hardware. GNU/Linux evangelists, on the other hand, have, in the past especially, had a tendency to sell their operating system as magical software that works on every machine always. This is, of course, totally false. When I buy a laptop I check several sources (including the Ubuntu Certified list) to make sure the machine I end up with will be fully supported, preferably with open drivers.
    - npsimons 13y ago
      GNU/Linux evangelists, on the other hand, have, in the past especially, had a tendency to sell their operating system as magical software that works on every machine always. This is, of course, totally false. It's not totally false; Linux will work on almost everything, most of the time. While I'll second the notion that you should really, really, really, really make sure that your hardware is supported before you buy the hardware, I think I can safely say that the range of driver support in the Linux kernel is unparalleled. The only other OS that even competes (and for that, only CPU architectures) is NetBSD. In my experience, if Linux doesn't support a piece of hardware out of the box, you had better dump that hardware, because brother, that hardware won't be supported by anything.
      - fest 13y ago
        > In my experience, if Linux doesn't support a piece of hardware out of the box, > you had better dump that hardware, because brother, that hardware won't > be supported by anything. In my experience, the hardware support/drivers, esp. video and wireless, is better in wintel front. Sure, linux versions of those drivers usually give more power to user regarding configuration of device, but brother, I have never had to fiddle with driver configuration to get HW acceleration working for flash in windows. Just download and install video adapter drivers, install flashplayer, and it just works.
  - teeja 13y ago
    Sound setup bad? Not compared to 5 or 10 years ago, no. During that period (I can guarantee!) both Win and OSX were ALSO -miserable- experiences. Swim 10 yards, gain a foot bad. Make music for 5 minutes, debug the system for 2 hours bad. Hmmph. Kids nowadays.
    - walls 13y ago
      > During that period (I can guarantee!) both Win and OSX were ALSO -miserable- experiences. Really? Because Windows XP has been out for 12 years, and that was far from a "miserable experience".
    - eridius 13y ago
      Do you have anything at all to back up this claim? Sound on Mac OS and OS X has always been an It Just Works™ experience, largely due to the tight integration between the hardware and the software (never any driver issues, etc).
    - njr123 13y ago
      Are you trolling? 5 to 10 years ago?! Windows 7 already came out 4 years ago. Windows XP is 12 years old, and audio already worked perfectly then. Hell, I can remember using Win 3.1 almost 20 years ago, and the audio there worked pretty well too, for the limited use cases the pc could handle.
    - teeja 13y ago
      Instead of the word "sound" I should have made clear that I was referring to professional audio, not PC-speaker quality sound. Unless you could afford a full-time technician, the hard- and software hurdles were formidable.
  - Thrymr 13y ago
    > Is sound still a problem on Linux? Yes. My desktop has mostly just worked for a few upgrades now, but new versions on my HTPC running XBMCbuntu have been hit and miss and taken some screwing around with the sound. This article from less than a year ago addresses some basic screw-ups that people on linux do trying to fix their sound troubles: http://voices.canonical.com/david.henningsson/2012/07/13/top-five-wrong-ways-to-fix-your-audio http://voices.canonical.com/david.henningsson/2012/07/13/top... That rings true to me.
  - throwaway1980 13y ago
    Yes, also problems with wireless/wired network card drivers and DVD playback are common. These are the kinds of things where you've just gotten them working, then you upgrade your distro and they stop working again. In theory they all probably work, even for your hardware, but getting the right versions of all the software necessary running at once on your machine is a pain. It doesn't have anything to do with paying the people who work on Linux, it's that the manufacturers of these devices don't have a commercial interest in making their hardware work in 30 different Linux distributions. They do have an interest in their products working flawlessly on all versions of OS X and Windows, and so they do what it takes to make it happen. Linux-based systems are great, but not when it comes to desktops where productivity is the point. They are good for desktops where tinkering and copyleft are the point. They are obviously a superior choice for anything that isn't a desktop.
    - takluyver 13y ago
      OK, I'm curious: DVD playback is definitely a bit of a fiddle (mostly for legal reasons), and I've heard of wifi problems (although I understand most recent chipsets work)... but wired network drivers? I've never heard about problems with wired networking, and none of the computers I've installed Linux on has ever had a problem with it.
      - throwaway1980 13y ago
        It was a Thinkpad from around 1999, and my ethernet stopped working after an Ubuntu upgrade, sometime around kernel 2.6.8 if I remember correctly. I'm sure there'd have been a fix if I'd found the right forum or IRC channel, but having lived through Gentoo and Debian installs, by then I had simply stopped caring. Apple was making fully functional Unix desktops, which is all I really cared about, so I went and got one and that was that.
  - 10098 13y ago
    Sound on Linux wasn't a problem 5 years ago. In fact, it wasn't a problem even earlier. I started using linux on a regular basis circa 2006 and never ran into any problems with sound. I used different distros (knoppix, ASPLinux, openSUSE, ubuntu, linux mint, arch) on different desktop machines and laptops. The worst problem I had was with winmodems that refused to work with anything but windows, but even that I was able to solve by installing some weird drivers.
  - Udo 13y ago
    Yes, it is. I use Linux servers mostly, but about a year ago I installed openSuSE on two new desktops. The problem was that, while sound "worked" in general, only one application could use the sound card at a time. That means when you have your audio player open, Youtube won't work at the same time. You'd have to close both apps and then re-open the browser so it could then hog the audio. The most annoying thing about this, however, were some of my desktop Linux friends who insisted this behavior was totally acceptable and not a bug.
    - drveen 13y ago
      I've been running openSuSE desktops for years. When pulse became standard, I made a practice of ripping it out (rpm -e...). I've happily had plain ALSA sound with sound from multiple apps at once. No, I don't know the details - only that it works. YMMV.
      - mrud 13y ago
        probably dmix
    - quasive 13y ago
      This is absolutely unacceptable, and the main reason I still use a SoundBlaster Live instead of my onboard sound. The SBLive can do hardware mixing and the Linux driver makes this transparent, so even OSS programs can run simultaneously. ALSA is supposed to be able to do this transparently (in software) with dmix, but in my experience that only works with ALSA-aware programs, not those using the OSS API. I don't care that on Linux OSS is deprecated: it should just work. In short, Linux sound is still obnoxious unless you are lucky enough to have hardware mixing work, or you only use programs which properly deal with ALSA.
      - sethrin 13y ago
        >I don't care that xxxx is deprecated: it should just work. Setting aside the concept of extrapolating from a small sample size using an admittedly deprecated system (on apparently poor hardware) which hasn't seen any significant use this decade, to "Linux sound is still obnoxious"... The temerity of insisting that any deprecated software work perfectly is appalling. I am sad to say that my imagination does not stretch so far as to envision a world where this was a reasonable expectation. The one small solace that I can bring away from your post is that such an attitude must engender its own punishment.
  - dekhn 13y ago
    I just spent a big part of my weekend debugging why sound stopped working on my machine. It ended up being several different reasons: 1) pulseaudio/JACK integration problems 2) my audio hardware moved from one device number to another. ultimately this required editing config files, running strace, and inspecting log files closely. linux is only free if your time is worthless.
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    ETA: Seems the answer is "yes". More like "it depends" or maybe "if you want it to be". For the vast majority of basic use cases (listening to music using XMMS, Rhythmbox, Youtube videos, etc.) it usually "just works" with most recent Linux distros on most non-esoteric hardware. At least that's been my experience using that last 5 or 6 Fedora releases, on a variety of hardware. Now, if you want to get into fiddling with JACK vs. PulseAudio and tweaking ALSA, etc., then you can get into some complicated shit, most of which I don't understand, which I why I just leave it alone. But, I'm not doing specialized audio production and editing stuff either. That's a whole different world, which I can't speak to at all.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    For everyone claiming sound is a problem, there are dozens of users for whom it just works. Most of them are not passionate enough about sound to say it just works.
  - cjh_ 13y ago
    For the most part, sound is not still a problem. I commonly use 3 machines where I want sound (work,home,laptop) running a variety of different distros (arch,debian,ubuntu) and sounds works for me in all of them, mostly alsa although ubuntu is pulseaudio. In the 99% case it just works, the only config I have to do is for my external DAC and that requires a few line config file (telling alsa to default to using my DAC rather than the first card it finds)
  - innguest 13y ago
    "It really isn't." "Not really." "Linux sound hasn't been a problem for some of us for, oh, I don't know, well over 10 years" "Sound on Linux wasn't a problem 5 years ago. In fact, it wasn't a problem even earlier." "Sound setup bad? Not compared to 5 or 10 years ago, no. During that period (I can guarantee!) both Win and OSX were ALSO -miserable- experiences." "No, sound is not a problem on Linux. I wonder if it ever was actually." "I don't even understand where this myths come from." Another reason I gave up on Linux was all the denialists that insisted that everything works fine on Linux and that if it's not working fine for me then I must be doing something wrong. I don't understand how one can come here and say "Not a problem" edgewise to so many comments saying "Yes, definitely". Never listen to a fanatic, I guess.
    - lmickh 13y ago
      A lot of it probably stems from the use cases. Most Linux distros have the "out of the box" use case down. When people start to fiddle with it or push the limits, they increasingly change their tone. Nothing fanatical about it. Just different points of view.
      - ecaron 13y ago
        I can state it simply. My laptop dual-boots into Linux Mint 14 and Windows 8. Both systems recognized the soundcard without any hassle. If I pick a random YouTube video (so not anything ultra fancy), the Windows 8 sound is phenomenal and Linux Mint sound is passable. And I'm not talking sound on the level of "The Great MP3 Bitrate Experiment"[1], I'm talking the quality of a Bose against airline freebie headsets. [1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-great-mp3-bitrate-experiment.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-great-mp3-bitra...
    - bkor 13y ago
      You have that with any topic. If you want to be credible, investigate which percentage of people have problems. That is an interesting statistic. Compare to this: You want to buy a new laptop. You'll see various complaints. Maybe even the same amount of complaints for company X and company Y. This doesn't at all indicate a problem. However, if company X has 0.1% laptop market share and company Y has 40% market share, I'd go for company Y (same amount of complaints vs bigger usage). Or in other words: Suggesting "there is a problem" as well as "there is not a problem" is both useless. Loads of distributions use PulseAudio by default btw. :P
  - mpyne 13y ago
    I haven't had a major problem with sound since probably KDE 3.4 timeframe or so. But on the other hand I've kept about the same ALSA configuration the whole time. I don't know what it's like for the users using recent distros.
  - makomk 13y ago
    Yes. My current fun issue with PulseAudio is that volume control handling is broken in all sorts of interesting ways, especially with applications that try and change their own volume. Also it randomly stops playing sound correctly and has to be killed and restarted if I want to get it back.
  - nnoitra 13y ago
    And it still is a failure.
  - mayhew 13y ago
    I've been using Linux for about 2-3 years now, and in every distribution I've used (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch), sound has "just worked".
  - derekp7 13y ago
    Just to add my two cents here, two things... I'm using a Thinkpad X230 with Fedora 17. Everything was working pretty good, but one of the updates caused sound from VLC to have a lot of static for the first 30 seconds or so after waking from suspend. But only VLC -- no other apps were affected. I reverted to an earlier kernel, problem went away. Seems this was fixed after a couple months on another kernel update (or combination of kernel and VLC update). Secondly -- I picked up a generic USB 5.1 sound card. All works well, except the center and subwoofer channels are switched. I've seen a few posts here and there on editing some PulseAudio configs, but they don't seem to apply to the version that Fedora 17 ships with. But the proper fix is to register this sound module in the "glitches" section of the appropriate Kernel driver, and have it swap the channel mappings there. Still working on finding which data structures the output channel maps are stored in -- if anyone here has worked with programming these kernel modules, let me know and I'll dig up where I left off.
  - virtualwhys 13y ago
    pulseaudio -k Was more than helpful pre-Fedora 18 in dealing with sound issues; now, things are pretty good. Gnome 3 on the other hand, wow, fail whale on many fronts ;-)
    - bkor 13y ago
      Read the title of the article. GNOME relies on PulseAudio. If thinks break when you break a desktop environments expectations, it should not be surprising.
  - jeltz 13y ago
    For me it is. I had to uninstall pulseaudio to get sound to work at my Debian Wheezy machine. With alsa though it has worked without any problems. And yes, I am a lazy bastard who has not reported the bug.
  - kokey 13y ago
    I think if sound was working on the Linux server estates of tens of thousands of servers that I have worked on, that would be a problem. I don't really see Linux as a desktop OS, but the attempts at making it one is quite valiant.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 13y ago
    As a Java game engine developer, I can say it's still a problem with Java. Sound mixing will work or not depending on people's installed sound system, sound cards, Linux distro, and a plethora of other factors I don't understand (and apparently no one understands, according to forum searches). And yes, I know most of you don't like Java, but this is still a problem that doesn't happen in any other OS (OS X is Unix and handles this fine).
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      The problem with UNIX is that it is too abstract concept. The POSIX standard will only cover you an API for command line applications and daemons, everything else is vendor specific.
  - elmindreda 13y ago
    It has worked for me on every system I've ever had, most of which have been laptops. Nowadays, I use Ubuntu, and nearly everything works out of the box on every system I have. Currently, the only issue is the backlight on a very new gaming laptop. I had to download and compile a third-party kernel module for that, which while not a big hassle for me is clearly unacceptable from a usability perspective. I suggest that some of the problems people are having stem from using distros that either don't care about or have the resources to support desktop use.
  - happy_dino 13y ago
    > why Linux can't win the OS wars It can't win, because it pretty much already has. Embedded: Linux. Smartphones: Linux. Appliances: Linux. Desktop: Windows. Server: Linux. HPC: Linux.
- gcb0 13y ago
  well, it's only a problem because sound was never done the linux way. i.e it was never done with choice in mind. so yes, linux is about choice. sound implementations are not. so they give every linux user hell.
  - bkor 13y ago
    Linux is not about choice. Choice just introduces additional complexities, makes it more difficult to test and additional layers is additional bugs. You seem to suggest that introducing choice would make things less buggy. Care to explain how that would be?
Aardwolf 13y ago
Indeed, it's just about using an OS that's great for developing. An OS that has certain advantages over others that appeal to certain users that like those advantages. By hackers, for hackers.
elisee 13y ago
Just a quick note: this is a mailing list post from January 2008. Might be worth tagging the HN headline with it. (EDIT: it's been done)
- emillon 13y ago
  Edited, thanks.
jacquesm 13y ago
OS: the huge pile of code that you need to get process abstraction, a file system, networking and possibly some human interface stuff up and running. Code best not seen nor heard because that means you're not doing what you should be doing: using applications or writing them. OS software is a commodity, and with portability being Linux' mainstay it can now be found on processors of almost any pedigree. Linux is all about choice: it is about being able to choose the hardware you want and to couple it with the software that you want. But that choice is overwhelming at times and there is definitely a case to be made for a restricted version of all that choice. Ironically this leads to more distros, hence more choice...
- ctdonath 13y ago
  It's not the proliferation of choices that's the problem, its that so many of those choices don't work.
  - roc 13y ago
    And there's so little information available/presented to the person who has to make that choice, as to which ones do work, or which ones they should even want to work.
    - danielweber 13y ago
      You might find some old mailing list that says "oh, you need to grgab version 1.2.3 of package_thing" But version 1.2.3 of package_thing was obsolete 3 years ago, and the latest version requires you to update your glibc. I upgrade Linux buying a new system and copying what I want to the new hardware.
    - cpleppert 13y ago
      So you mean there isn't anything magical about Linux and it isn't the embodiment of "Freedom and Choice" and every piece of software that runs on it must be carefully designed to integrate with other software packages? I'm about to faint!
    - VLM 13y ago
plutr 13y ago
Why is this old stuff from 2008 being posted and upvoted?
- cag_ii 13y ago
  If just as relevant today as it was then, why shouldn't it be?
  - plutr 13y ago
    Because the point of a news site is to deliver information that is both new and interesting to the reader. If something is from 5 years ago, it is drastically more likely that the reader either knows it already or is not interested, as opposed to things that are, say, less than a month old. Especially if that information was reposted constantly, as that logic would allow.
    - mwfunk 13y ago
      If it's getting upvoted, then by definition it's interesting to people. It's not new but it's still relevant, and having a discussion about it on HN 5 years later is certainly new, which was probably the intent.
    - scott_s 13y ago
      Then we must conclude that "Hacker News" is not strictly a "news" site.
    - Jtsummers 13y ago
      Along with being a news site this is also a discussion site. If the article is new to the reader or leads to discussion that interests the reader, then they're free to upvote it. When it's not, they can ignore it (or flag it if it truly doesn't belong). It's really that simple. When links get posted that have no relevance to you, just move on. Post links that are relevant to your interests or wait for someone else to do it for you.
- mpyne 13y ago
  It's as right now as it was 5 years ago, and has a lot of corrolary with other customer-facing, resource-constrained software maintenance environments that you might see from a YC participant. And I say this as a Linux user who doesn't use PulseAudio...
TallGuyShort 13y ago
>> If you try to deliver both at once you have to also deliver a way of switching between the two. I would argue instead that Linux is about freedom. In other words, rather than expecting my distro to go out of its way to provide multiple choices and a way of switching between those choices, I expect it to not go out of its way to prevent me from switching if I chooose to, even if switching is difficult, and even if it needs to warn me that what I'm about to do is a bad idea.
bifrost 13y ago
I'm not sure what this thread is about frankly. It reeks of "ooh, linux is great because its !somethingelse" that used to pervade academia and a lot of the industry. Frankly that still pervades but there's finally more substance behind "Linux" as a whole. For a lot of newbies "Linux" was their first experience with a unix-like system, so they either loved it or were made to use it and became familiar with it. Thats not particularly a bad thing but it results in this rampant fanboyism thats kinda annoying to someone who was using other systems beforehand. So yeah, you get "choice" with Linux, but you get it with a bunch of other operating systems too, you just have to do a different amount of work. There are plenty of things that are not easier in Linux, but really its all about tradeoffs.
- benihana 13y ago
  >I'm not sure what this thread is about frankly. Make a decision, even if it's difficult and even if it will piss off your users. Don't defer the making of a decision to the user and hide behind "choice"
frozenport 13y ago
Big distros don't use Linux how Linux developers use Linux. The guys that write Linux software always have the latest version and test against them. Once I switched to Gentoo I have a rock solid system with the latest and greatest software packages. Every week I update all my software and my laptop has been running on the same install for 2 years, with Ubuntu some random nonsense would fail every 6 months and with SUSE you would be using GCC from the stone age.
- IanChiles 13y ago
  Gentoo and Arch are wonderful for staying absolutely up to date. Far better IMO than anything else - but for anything production wise or mission critical, nothing comes close to Debian, RHEL/CentOS, and SuSe
mwfunk 13y ago
I don't think Linux is about anything (and that includes intangibles like "choice" or "freedom"). It's an open source kernel that a bunch of people hack on, that's it. The traditional Linux distro model is about choice, but that was from necessity, not design. Android and Ubuntu and others have shown that there's a whole spectrum of OS's with varying degrees of specific design and policy that you can build on top of the Linux kernel and specific pieces of the traditional Linux userland stack. I don't think any one of these things is the right way to do a Linux-based system, I just see all of that software as the primordial ooze that various OS's arise out of. There was a local minimum in the late '90s and early 2000s in which most of the distros were trying to do the same thing in different ways and remain more or less compatible with each other, but these days there's a lot more willingness to actually try to design complete systems, which include things like UI policies and standard libraries that limit their compatibility with other systems. I think this is great- the traditional distro model is still going strong via Debian and Slackware and so on, but I'm glad that people are thinking about Linux in new and more specific ways as well. (EDIT: typo)
- bkor 13y ago
  The article is not about the kernel, but about delivering something people can use and expect that it works. So not just a kernel itself. Fairly common to call that Linux, even if technically it is just the kernel (and IMO GNU/Linux is "urgh").
es20641 13y ago
I don't really follow this argument. "... because there are so many kinds of cars you can buy that cars are about choice." The "Choice" part of Linux doesn't come into play so much when you are "shopping for a distro", it's the fact that if there is something you don't like the spoiler on your distro, you can switch to another. Heck, you can even build the distro from the ground up and choose EVERYTHING in it.
GhotiFish 13y ago
Yup, no one could disagree with this sentiment. Nuke old useless features, if you have new better ways of doing things, and they actually are better, that's awesome. Do that As long as you actually DO have a better way to do things.
zokier 13y ago
I think Linux is kinda about choice (as a base building block for your own OS). And distros are out there to make those choices so that I don't have to.
noonespecial 13y ago
Part of the problem is that linux isn't linux the way windows is windows, and people expect it to be.
MostAwesomeDude 13y ago
Ctrl+F "ajax" isn't finding anything, so... The poster here goes by "ajax" on more useful communication channels (i.e. IRC). He's one of the most competent hackers I've ever been able to work with, and his ethos comes through loud and clear here: If code is broken, fix it. If code is being misused, stop abusing it. If code is missing, write it.
- slashclee 13y ago
  You're forgetting perhaps the most powerful ethos of ajax: If the code can be deleted, nuke it.
pixelmonkey 13y ago
"Software is hard. The way to fix it is to fix it, not sweep it under the rug." Love this line. Been thinking a lot about this as I work on scaling a large-ish SaaS product that has been in the market for 18 months. One other interesting dynamic: sales teams always think it's better to add things than to remove things (after all, you can't sell the things you remove), which I now realize is partially the reason many enterprise software packages feel "bloated" over time.
- nrivadeneira 13y ago
  "One other interesting dynamic: sales teams always think it's better to add things than to remove things (after all, you can't sell the things you remove), which I now realize is partially the reason many enterprise software packages feel "bloated" over time." I'm experiencing exactly this. It's like they want to have every feature to be able to whip out for every type of customer. They dread the circumstance where they have to say "Sorry, we don't do that."
  - gizzlon 13y ago
    Well, they often work on commission..
    - nrivadeneira 13y ago
      True, but in the case of startups with limited dev resources, bloat adds to development and maintenance cost. Poor management of resources like that could mean trouble for a startup.
justsee 13y ago
This was an entertaining talk from CCC in 2011 on desktop Linux. 'datenwolf' was the speaker, and he starts talking about sound in Linux here. [1] He's quickly interrupted by the maintainer of PulseAudio, and this interruption continues throughout the talk. My takeaway was that if there was still this amount of confusion and misunderstanding in the community, my frustrating experiences with sound in desktop Ubuntu was not atypical of dekstop Linux users. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0#t=11m http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0#t=11m
- vinkelhake 13y ago
  Wolfgang 'datenwolf' Draxinger later, in true Bender-style, started his own audio system [1]. The creator of JACK had some comments [2]. They also went head to head in a thread on phoronix around that time. [1] http://klang.eudyptula.org http://klang.eudyptula.org [2] https://community.ardour.org/pd_on_klang https://community.ardour.org/pd_on_klang
- makomk 13y ago
  PulseAudio decided - as it does - to turn my headphone volume up to 100% when that video started playing. Gotta love audio on Linux!
  - bkor 13y ago
    Are you sure it is PulseAudio? In case of multiple outputs (headphones, speakers), PulseAudio can change volumes of them based on data from ALSA. Intention is that volume stays the same, except if the data from ALSA is wrong. Even with one output wrong info from ALSA will result in sudden volume changes.
- bkor 13y ago
  Your takeaway should be that the speaker is very confused and got a lot of things totally wrong. The presentation is not about PulseAudio, it is about various stacks. The amount of things he states that are just wrong is unbelievable. Lennart is pointing out all the flaws. It has been suggested that this somehow is an attack. IMO, if a talk need that much correcting, something is wrong with the talk. Anyway, one confused speaker is not representive of a community.
marshray 13y ago
Who is this redhat.com and why should I care what color their fedora is? Of course I'm being a quite facetious here. But the point is that I have many computers and VMs running several operating systems, many with Linux kernels, but somehow I've not chosen the Red Fedora. I wasn't aware they even cared that much about desktop users. Perhaps I have the "disease which strangles the mind"?
- bkor 13y ago
  You should investigate how much Red Hat contributes all over Linux. Server side, but also loads of components used by various desktops. Not knowing about the huge contributions makes it overdue to investigate.
  - marshray 13y ago
    I do know, which is why I said I was being facetious. My point was that it's ironic for them to be talking about reducing user choice when somehow given all their contributions to Linux I'd not chosen to use their system anyway.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
antihero 13y ago
Yes, but when we get to things like Gnome and KDE, the ability to choose to run far far away from them is a very very good thing.

301 points by emillon 13y ago

Epic: "But the chain of logic from 'Linux is about choice' to 'ship everything and let the user chose how they want their sound to not work' starts with fallacy and ends with disaster."

ctdonath 13y ago
Is sound still a problem on Linux? I realize the article is about 5 years old, but Linux has been around for a long time now, and sound is a really basic function I'd expect even obtuse geeks would want to solve. If it is still a problem, seems that's a definitive concise example of why Linux can't win the OS wars: some things must work, even if nobody wants the task of making it work; sometimes the only solution is to pay someone to do what nobody else wants to. ETA: Seems the answer is "yes".
- kfk 13y ago
  No, sound is not a problem on Linux. I wonder if it ever was actually.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    It's always been a morass of competing, incompatible sound servers and APIs. Coding up anything more trivial than "beep" that works on a wide variety of distributions is painful.
    - EdiX 13y ago
      I don't even understand where this myths come from. Linux "the kernel" switched 15 years ago from OSS to ALSA for drivers, ALSA has been backwards compatible with OSS since. Gnome and KDE used to have their own user space sound servers (called EsounD and aRts) mostly to impement software mixing. They were completely replaced over 5 years ago by PulseAudio which is backwards compatible with both as well as applications using ALSA or OSS API. You could code an application using OSS API and be compatible with the first release of linux that had sound. What problems do you have exactly with your beeps?
      - walls 13y ago
        You got lucky with your hardware; nothing more. Sound in Linux has been a living nightmare.
  - dscrd 13y ago
    It was a problem until Pulseaudio became good -- to my experience, that happened around the 2.0 release. And in a technical sense, it's still a problem, since ALSA contains so much useless complexity now that something like PA finally exists.
  - rlu 13y ago
    I have a netbook running xubuntu and when I connect it to a TV via HDMI, the sound continues to come from the netbook rather than from the TV. I googled for some fixes and couldn't find any quick fix that worked. This should "just work" in my opinion. It does in Windows and I'm sure OSX makes it just as painless.
    - VLM 13y ago
      What does "just work" mean? I have a mythtv frontend that squirts its video out a HDMI and audio out of a optical fiber to the surround sound system. It would drive me crazy if sound came out of the horrible TV speakers instead of the surround sound system. Two separate problems: 1) Default behavior where no change is the least surprising so at least that is OK. 2) Modify config where its obviously a fail if you can't figure out how to change the config. For whatever its worth, if you use ALSA, mythtv is ALSA compatible, so I merely go into "config" "audio" and mess around with audio options to my hearts content.
    - girvo 13y ago
      Doesn't in Windows, not on every laptop. Dell Studio 15 over here has the same problem on Windows 7. *shrugs, just wanted to add an anecdote.
    - parfe 13y ago
      Quickfix: Install pavucontrol. You can control on a per application basis which output to send audio to and move the stream on the fly. It doesn't "Just work" in windows. Windows will set a default and send all audio to that device without any controls for moving audio from one output to another. I have to restart my browser if I want to move from watching netflix on my monitor to my TV.
  - readme 13y ago
    It was. Before pulseaudio became the de-facto standard lots of people wouldn't even install an additional layer and use plain old alsa. Which meant you couldn't change the volumes of applications individually. You could have used artsd, esd, or something else, but the problem was that there shouldn't be 3 bad solutions to choose from. There should be one good solution. I remember installing redhat 9 and having to configure my sound card driver manually for an old creative soundblaster about 10 years ago. Further, back in those days it was not at all obvious how to get Linux to even play an MP3 (I know, this is an audio encoding and not related to the audio subsystem, but my point is: it was hard. These days you just install a mainstream distro and mp3 codec is there.) Linux has come a tremendous way in the last 10 years. Don't you remember the nightmares? Editing Xorg.conf, and such? But wait, I remember when it was still called XF86Config. /me shudders Today anyone can pop in an ubuntu dvd and be rolling in seconds with all hardware working (for a lot of systems*). Not long ago we had to research our hardware and hunt down solutions just to get a working machine.
    - teeja 13y ago
      Really. I just installed LM LXDE 11 on an ancient PC the other day that had a Soundblaster card covered in dust. Started up an MP3 and started plugging a 1/8" plug into holes on the back. When I got to the SB card, bingo. No install, no prefs ... just worked.
  - greyfade 13y ago
    For many years, the API incompatibility between OSS and ALSA made getting sound working at all was often a nightmarish task. There were a number of sound servers that tried to alleviate the problem, but they all used incompatible APIs and couldn't be used in parallel. It was, and is, awful. It's only very, very recently that PulseAudio has gotten to the point where it works most of the time, and it still has major unresolved problems. And there are still programs that use the OSS and ALSA APIs directly. While it does work fairly well, there are still incompatibility issues with programs that use Pulse. It's ludicrous to suggest that there are no problems.
- npsimons 13y ago
  Linux sound hasn't been a problem for some of us for, oh, I don't know, well over 10 years (1999? 1998? I can't remember), and no, I'm not talking about "well I can write sound drivers, therefore it works for me, har har har!" I've never quite understood the problems people had, since I've always had Linux sound "just work" for me out of the box. Sure, back in the ISA bus days, you had to specify things like IRQs, but you had to do that on any OS where you had cards with hardware jumperable IRQs. Pulseaudio, I thankfully didn't have to deal with until it was actually working, but it still struck me as very much an NIH solution in search of a problem. I still remember the Enlightened Sound Daemon with software mixing, and thought it was nifty, but not a hard requirement.
  - pyre 13y ago
    I don't know about now, but running Linux on a ThinkPad X41 a couple of years ago with suspend-to-RAM. After a fresh boot a sleep-wake will work twice before the auto switching between speakers and headphones quits. Hibernating and waking will fix it only for one sleep-wake cycle. A full reboot would fix it so that it would work for two more sleep-wake cycles. I was fully willing to get my hands dirty with a little help (couldn't make heads or tails of the ALSA code), but Ubuntu just decided to shelf it into the 'leave it alone until everyone goes away' bucket on LaunchPad.
    - takluyver 13y ago
      I know how frustrating it can be when your bug isn't getting attention, but I've also been on the other side of that. It's not like Ubuntu (or any project) has hordes of developers who're just too lazy to tackle your bug: maybe not many people have that model, or don't tend to switch between speakers and headphones much. Maybe people couldn't reproduce the bug, or maybe just no-one could see how to fix it. There's a whole host of reasons why bugs don't get fixed, but it's rarely because the project as a whole 'just decided to shelve it'.
      - pyre 13y ago
        I realize that there are reasons, and I'm not necessarily angry at Ubuntu, but I've dealt with these types of issues before and it's frustrating. I had the ALSA source code and was ready to attempt some hardware hacking, but: 1) The chipset was a common one, and the issue specific to this model. I had no idea how to proceed from there. 2) I couldn't make heads or tails out of the structure of the code, and what was happening (or why). I tried to find some sort of "this is happening here" where I could work out the rest from there, but couldn't find it. 3) I volunteered myself on the bug page, but there was never a response to it. 4) I've never hacked on kernel code (beyond compiling it from scratch 'back in the day') or done any hardware hacking, but I was willing to look at resources if people pointed me in the right direction. The project "as a whole" doesn't do anything with respect to specific bugs (there are exceptions), but the individuals that do take action, take that action on behalf of Ubuntu.
- gue5t 13y ago
  It really isn't. Unless you have a card without a driver (exceedingly rare, though it's not uncommon to need a recent kernel to use recent hardware) ALSA pretty much Just Works. For complex features like streaming sound over the network you need PulseAudio, which due to its complexity takes more configuration and setup, but that's done out of the box on a fair number of distros. I don't know of any major software that requires OSS (though if I'm not mistaken it's still the preferred solution for BSD and therefore often available as an option), and only professional software uses JACK; users of JACK generally buy high-end hardware specifically for that purpose and know what they're doing. So there are three major components for different purposes. Core audio support is the domain of ALSA itself and Linux does a good job with it. PulseAudio provides advanced capabilities on top of the more basic/hardware-oriented functionality in ALSA, and JACK provides low-latency audio for realtime applications that need it (not games, only really audio processing equipment). With large amounts of work the partial redundancy between these components could be removed, but it's really not a big issue; for desktop or professional use getting things to work right isn't too hard.
  - peterwwillis 13y ago
    My sound card "mostly" worked when I installed Linux this year. But I spent a week researching to finally deduce how to modify my Skype and Alsa configs by hand to get Skype to use the microphone. I still don't remember what I did, though it had to do with setting a specific hardware type id. Nobody should ever have to do that.
    - dman 13y ago
      Which distro? What sound hardware?
    - bkor 13y ago
      Skype works out of the box with PulseAudio. No setup or settings required.
  - pmahoney 13y ago
    I actually find PulseAudio vs. JACK incredibly annoying. I like to play around with "professional" audio. I don't consider it professional, but more relevantly I like to play with certain apps that require JACK. It's certainly an RTFM thing, but last time I didn't know how to get PulseAudio to go away. I wrote a shell script to keep killing it in a loop (since it restarts itself) long enough to get JACK to take over. I know there must be better ways... Then inevitably once I've got JACK setup, I'll want to play some background music or watch some Flash video online without tearing down my JACK setup. Oops, does that audio player support JACK natively? Do I have that plugin installed? Can I run Pulse and have it direct output into JACK? None of this has worked smoothly in my experience. > users of JACK generally buy high-end hardware specifically for that purpose and know what they're doing This has not been my experience. I love to dabble, but apparently don't know what I'm doing.
- yew 13y ago
  Sound isn't a problem for me. I just use ALSA and everything works (I haven't edited a single configuration file, actually). The sound-server wars are still ongoing but I've personally never had any cause to touch anything besides ALSA or OpenAL/SDL on the development side either. Other people may have different experiences.
- Kaivo 13y ago
  I recently had trouble with my sound card on Arch Linux. Upon booting, once in a while, my default sound output would change and not work even after I'd edit it. Turns out it was my card model that wasn't supported and I just removed it. I've been working with the on-board output since then and everything is going just fine.
- danielweber 13y ago
  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.)
  - dman 13y ago
    "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.
    - danielweber 13y ago
      Then all the answers about "Unity isn't so bad, because you can switch away from it" become void.
      - glesica 13y ago
        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.
- theon144 13y ago
  Not really. Regarding "usual" sound, I haven't had a problem for years now, and just a while ago I actually set up a fairly complex system with JACK for a music performance I was preparing (midi controllers each connected to a specific synth software, some of that straight to output, some of it to looper software first, along with the mic input, etc.) and I was surprised at how smooth it all went. I really think Linux left that behind in 2008 :)
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  The new challenge in the embedded community is device tree apparently. Lots of gripes about arbitrarily changing something that worked. Printing continues to be painful, as does direct to framebuffer graphics.
- glesica 13y ago
  Linux is already winning the OS wars, it's called Android ;-) Just being snarky, I get your point. I've said this before, and I think it is important to keep in mind when discussing GNU/Linux: things work quite well... on supported hardware. The vast majority of tales of woe related to GNU/Linux and hardware end up coming down to incompatible hardware. This is a communication problem, not a technical problem. No one gets upset that OS X won't run on a random Acer netbook from 4 years ago because Apple has made clear that their OS is only supposed to work on their hardware. GNU/Linux evangelists, on the other hand, have, in the past especially, had a tendency to sell their operating system as magical software that works on every machine always. This is, of course, totally false. When I buy a laptop I check several sources (including the Ubuntu Certified list) to make sure the machine I end up with will be fully supported, preferably with open drivers.
  - npsimons 13y ago
    GNU/Linux evangelists, on the other hand, have, in the past especially, had a tendency to sell their operating system as magical software that works on every machine always. This is, of course, totally false. It's not totally false; Linux will work on almost everything, most of the time. While I'll second the notion that you should really, really, really, really make sure that your hardware is supported before you buy the hardware, I think I can safely say that the range of driver support in the Linux kernel is unparalleled. The only other OS that even competes (and for that, only CPU architectures) is NetBSD. In my experience, if Linux doesn't support a piece of hardware out of the box, you had better dump that hardware, because brother, that hardware won't be supported by anything.
    - fest 13y ago
      > In my experience, if Linux doesn't support a piece of hardware out of the box, > you had better dump that hardware, because brother, that hardware won't > be supported by anything. In my experience, the hardware support/drivers, esp. video and wireless, is better in wintel front. Sure, linux versions of those drivers usually give more power to user regarding configuration of device, but brother, I have never had to fiddle with driver configuration to get HW acceleration working for flash in windows. Just download and install video adapter drivers, install flashplayer, and it just works.
- teeja 13y ago
  Sound setup bad? Not compared to 5 or 10 years ago, no. During that period (I can guarantee!) both Win and OSX were ALSO -miserable- experiences. Swim 10 yards, gain a foot bad. Make music for 5 minutes, debug the system for 2 hours bad. Hmmph. Kids nowadays.
  - walls 13y ago
    > During that period (I can guarantee!) both Win and OSX were ALSO -miserable- experiences. Really? Because Windows XP has been out for 12 years, and that was far from a "miserable experience".
  - eridius 13y ago
    Do you have anything at all to back up this claim? Sound on Mac OS and OS X has always been an It Just Works™ experience, largely due to the tight integration between the hardware and the software (never any driver issues, etc).
  - njr123 13y ago
    Are you trolling? 5 to 10 years ago?! Windows 7 already came out 4 years ago. Windows XP is 12 years old, and audio already worked perfectly then. Hell, I can remember using Win 3.1 almost 20 years ago, and the audio there worked pretty well too, for the limited use cases the pc could handle.
  - teeja 13y ago
    Instead of the word "sound" I should have made clear that I was referring to professional audio, not PC-speaker quality sound. Unless you could afford a full-time technician, the hard- and software hurdles were formidable.
- Thrymr 13y ago
  > Is sound still a problem on Linux? Yes. My desktop has mostly just worked for a few upgrades now, but new versions on my HTPC running XBMCbuntu have been hit and miss and taken some screwing around with the sound. This article from less than a year ago addresses some basic screw-ups that people on linux do trying to fix their sound troubles: http://voices.canonical.com/david.henningsson/2012/07/13/top-five-wrong-ways-to-fix-your-audio http://voices.canonical.com/david.henningsson/2012/07/13/top... That rings true to me.
- throwaway1980 13y ago
  Yes, also problems with wireless/wired network card drivers and DVD playback are common. These are the kinds of things where you've just gotten them working, then you upgrade your distro and they stop working again. In theory they all probably work, even for your hardware, but getting the right versions of all the software necessary running at once on your machine is a pain. It doesn't have anything to do with paying the people who work on Linux, it's that the manufacturers of these devices don't have a commercial interest in making their hardware work in 30 different Linux distributions. They do have an interest in their products working flawlessly on all versions of OS X and Windows, and so they do what it takes to make it happen. Linux-based systems are great, but not when it comes to desktops where productivity is the point. They are good for desktops where tinkering and copyleft are the point. They are obviously a superior choice for anything that isn't a desktop.
  - takluyver 13y ago
    OK, I'm curious: DVD playback is definitely a bit of a fiddle (mostly for legal reasons), and I've heard of wifi problems (although I understand most recent chipsets work)... but wired network drivers? I've never heard about problems with wired networking, and none of the computers I've installed Linux on has ever had a problem with it.
    - throwaway1980 13y ago
      It was a Thinkpad from around 1999, and my ethernet stopped working after an Ubuntu upgrade, sometime around kernel 2.6.8 if I remember correctly. I'm sure there'd have been a fix if I'd found the right forum or IRC channel, but having lived through Gentoo and Debian installs, by then I had simply stopped caring. Apple was making fully functional Unix desktops, which is all I really cared about, so I went and got one and that was that.
- 10098 13y ago
  Sound on Linux wasn't a problem 5 years ago. In fact, it wasn't a problem even earlier. I started using linux on a regular basis circa 2006 and never ran into any problems with sound. I used different distros (knoppix, ASPLinux, openSUSE, ubuntu, linux mint, arch) on different desktop machines and laptops. The worst problem I had was with winmodems that refused to work with anything but windows, but even that I was able to solve by installing some weird drivers.
- Udo 13y ago
  Yes, it is. I use Linux servers mostly, but about a year ago I installed openSuSE on two new desktops. The problem was that, while sound "worked" in general, only one application could use the sound card at a time. That means when you have your audio player open, Youtube won't work at the same time. You'd have to close both apps and then re-open the browser so it could then hog the audio. The most annoying thing about this, however, were some of my desktop Linux friends who insisted this behavior was totally acceptable and not a bug.
  - drveen 13y ago
    I've been running openSuSE desktops for years. When pulse became standard, I made a practice of ripping it out (rpm -e...). I've happily had plain ALSA sound with sound from multiple apps at once. No, I don't know the details - only that it works. YMMV.
    - mrud 13y ago
      probably dmix
  - quasive 13y ago
    This is absolutely unacceptable, and the main reason I still use a SoundBlaster Live instead of my onboard sound. The SBLive can do hardware mixing and the Linux driver makes this transparent, so even OSS programs can run simultaneously. ALSA is supposed to be able to do this transparently (in software) with dmix, but in my experience that only works with ALSA-aware programs, not those using the OSS API. I don't care that on Linux OSS is deprecated: it should just work. In short, Linux sound is still obnoxious unless you are lucky enough to have hardware mixing work, or you only use programs which properly deal with ALSA.
    - sethrin 13y ago
      >I don't care that xxxx is deprecated: it should just work. Setting aside the concept of extrapolating from a small sample size using an admittedly deprecated system (on apparently poor hardware) which hasn't seen any significant use this decade, to "Linux sound is still obnoxious"... The temerity of insisting that any deprecated software work perfectly is appalling. I am sad to say that my imagination does not stretch so far as to envision a world where this was a reasonable expectation. The one small solace that I can bring away from your post is that such an attitude must engender its own punishment.
- dekhn 13y ago
  I just spent a big part of my weekend debugging why sound stopped working on my machine. It ended up being several different reasons: 1) pulseaudio/JACK integration problems 2) my audio hardware moved from one device number to another. ultimately this required editing config files, running strace, and inspecting log files closely. linux is only free if your time is worthless.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  ETA: Seems the answer is "yes". More like "it depends" or maybe "if you want it to be". For the vast majority of basic use cases (listening to music using XMMS, Rhythmbox, Youtube videos, etc.) it usually "just works" with most recent Linux distros on most non-esoteric hardware. At least that's been my experience using that last 5 or 6 Fedora releases, on a variety of hardware. Now, if you want to get into fiddling with JACK vs. PulseAudio and tweaking ALSA, etc., then you can get into some complicated shit, most of which I don't understand, which I why I just leave it alone. But, I'm not doing specialized audio production and editing stuff either. That's a whole different world, which I can't speak to at all.
- rbanffy 13y ago
  For everyone claiming sound is a problem, there are dozens of users for whom it just works. Most of them are not passionate enough about sound to say it just works.
- cjh_ 13y ago
  For the most part, sound is not still a problem. I commonly use 3 machines where I want sound (work,home,laptop) running a variety of different distros (arch,debian,ubuntu) and sounds works for me in all of them, mostly alsa although ubuntu is pulseaudio. In the 99% case it just works, the only config I have to do is for my external DAC and that requires a few line config file (telling alsa to default to using my DAC rather than the first card it finds)
- innguest 13y ago
  "It really isn't." "Not really." "Linux sound hasn't been a problem for some of us for, oh, I don't know, well over 10 years" "Sound on Linux wasn't a problem 5 years ago. In fact, it wasn't a problem even earlier." "Sound setup bad? Not compared to 5 or 10 years ago, no. During that period (I can guarantee!) both Win and OSX were ALSO -miserable- experiences." "No, sound is not a problem on Linux. I wonder if it ever was actually." "I don't even understand where this myths come from." Another reason I gave up on Linux was all the denialists that insisted that everything works fine on Linux and that if it's not working fine for me then I must be doing something wrong. I don't understand how one can come here and say "Not a problem" edgewise to so many comments saying "Yes, definitely". Never listen to a fanatic, I guess.
  - lmickh 13y ago
    A lot of it probably stems from the use cases. Most Linux distros have the "out of the box" use case down. When people start to fiddle with it or push the limits, they increasingly change their tone. Nothing fanatical about it. Just different points of view.
    - ecaron 13y ago
      I can state it simply. My laptop dual-boots into Linux Mint 14 and Windows 8. Both systems recognized the soundcard without any hassle. If I pick a random YouTube video (so not anything ultra fancy), the Windows 8 sound is phenomenal and Linux Mint sound is passable. And I'm not talking sound on the level of "The Great MP3 Bitrate Experiment"[1], I'm talking the quality of a Bose against airline freebie headsets. [1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-great-mp3-bitrate-experiment.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-great-mp3-bitra...
  - bkor 13y ago
    You have that with any topic. If you want to be credible, investigate which percentage of people have problems. That is an interesting statistic. Compare to this: You want to buy a new laptop. You'll see various complaints. Maybe even the same amount of complaints for company X and company Y. This doesn't at all indicate a problem. However, if company X has 0.1% laptop market share and company Y has 40% market share, I'd go for company Y (same amount of complaints vs bigger usage). Or in other words: Suggesting "there is a problem" as well as "there is not a problem" is both useless. Loads of distributions use PulseAudio by default btw. :P
- mpyne 13y ago
  I haven't had a major problem with sound since probably KDE 3.4 timeframe or so. But on the other hand I've kept about the same ALSA configuration the whole time. I don't know what it's like for the users using recent distros.
- makomk 13y ago
  Yes. My current fun issue with PulseAudio is that volume control handling is broken in all sorts of interesting ways, especially with applications that try and change their own volume. Also it randomly stops playing sound correctly and has to be killed and restarted if I want to get it back.
- nnoitra 13y ago
  And it still is a failure.
- mayhew 13y ago
  I've been using Linux for about 2-3 years now, and in every distribution I've used (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch), sound has "just worked".
- derekp7 13y ago
  Just to add my two cents here, two things... I'm using a Thinkpad X230 with Fedora 17. Everything was working pretty good, but one of the updates caused sound from VLC to have a lot of static for the first 30 seconds or so after waking from suspend. But only VLC -- no other apps were affected. I reverted to an earlier kernel, problem went away. Seems this was fixed after a couple months on another kernel update (or combination of kernel and VLC update). Secondly -- I picked up a generic USB 5.1 sound card. All works well, except the center and subwoofer channels are switched. I've seen a few posts here and there on editing some PulseAudio configs, but they don't seem to apply to the version that Fedora 17 ships with. But the proper fix is to register this sound module in the "glitches" section of the appropriate Kernel driver, and have it swap the channel mappings there. Still working on finding which data structures the output channel maps are stored in -- if anyone here has worked with programming these kernel modules, let me know and I'll dig up where I left off.
- virtualwhys 13y ago
  pulseaudio -k Was more than helpful pre-Fedora 18 in dealing with sound issues; now, things are pretty good. Gnome 3 on the other hand, wow, fail whale on many fronts ;-)
  - bkor 13y ago
    Read the title of the article. GNOME relies on PulseAudio. If thinks break when you break a desktop environments expectations, it should not be surprising.
- jeltz 13y ago
  For me it is. I had to uninstall pulseaudio to get sound to work at my Debian Wheezy machine. With alsa though it has worked without any problems. And yes, I am a lazy bastard who has not reported the bug.
- kokey 13y ago
  I think if sound was working on the Linux server estates of tens of thousands of servers that I have worked on, that would be a problem. I don't really see Linux as a desktop OS, but the attempts at making it one is quite valiant.
- Al-Khwarizmi 13y ago
  As a Java game engine developer, I can say it's still a problem with Java. Sound mixing will work or not depending on people's installed sound system, sound cards, Linux distro, and a plethora of other factors I don't understand (and apparently no one understands, according to forum searches). And yes, I know most of you don't like Java, but this is still a problem that doesn't happen in any other OS (OS X is Unix and handles this fine).
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    The problem with UNIX is that it is too abstract concept. The POSIX standard will only cover you an API for command line applications and daemons, everything else is vendor specific.
- elmindreda 13y ago
  It has worked for me on every system I've ever had, most of which have been laptops. Nowadays, I use Ubuntu, and nearly everything works out of the box on every system I have. Currently, the only issue is the backlight on a very new gaming laptop. I had to download and compile a third-party kernel module for that, which while not a big hassle for me is clearly unacceptable from a usability perspective. I suggest that some of the problems people are having stem from using distros that either don't care about or have the resources to support desktop use.
- happy_dino 13y ago
  > why Linux can't win the OS wars It can't win, because it pretty much already has. Embedded: Linux. Smartphones: Linux. Appliances: Linux. Desktop: Windows. Server: Linux. HPC: Linux.
gcb0 13y ago
well, it's only a problem because sound was never done the linux way. i.e it was never done with choice in mind. so yes, linux is about choice. sound implementations are not. so they give every linux user hell.
- bkor 13y ago
  Linux is not about choice. Choice just introduces additional complexities, makes it more difficult to test and additional layers is additional bugs. You seem to suggest that introducing choice would make things less buggy. Care to explain how that would be?

Aardwolf 13y ago

Indeed, it's just about using an OS that's great for developing. An OS that has certain advantages over others that appeal to certain users that like those advantages. By hackers, for hackers.

elisee 13y ago

Just a quick note: this is a mailing list post from January 2008. Might be worth tagging the HN headline with it. (EDIT: it's been done)

emillon 13y ago
Edited, thanks.

jacquesm 13y ago

OS: the huge pile of code that you need to get process abstraction, a file system, networking and possibly some human interface stuff up and running. Code best not seen nor heard because that means you're not doing what you should be doing: using applications or writing them. OS software is a commodity, and with portability being Linux' mainstay it can now be found on processors of almost any pedigree. Linux is all about choice: it is about being able to choose the hardware you want and to couple it with the software that you want. But that choice is overwhelming at times and there is definitely a case to be made for a restricted version of all that choice. Ironically this leads to more distros, hence more choice...

ctdonath 13y ago
It's not the proliferation of choices that's the problem, its that so many of those choices don't work.
- roc 13y ago
  And there's so little information available/presented to the person who has to make that choice, as to which ones do work, or which ones they should even want to work.
  - danielweber 13y ago
    You might find some old mailing list that says "oh, you need to grgab version 1.2.3 of package_thing" But version 1.2.3 of package_thing was obsolete 3 years ago, and the latest version requires you to update your glibc. I upgrade Linux buying a new system and copying what I want to the new hardware.
  - cpleppert 13y ago
    So you mean there isn't anything magical about Linux and it isn't the embodiment of "Freedom and Choice" and every piece of software that runs on it must be carefully designed to integrate with other software packages? I'm about to faint!
  - VLM 13y ago

plutr 13y ago

Why is this old stuff from 2008 being posted and upvoted?

cag_ii 13y ago
If just as relevant today as it was then, why shouldn't it be?
- plutr 13y ago
  Because the point of a news site is to deliver information that is both new and interesting to the reader. If something is from 5 years ago, it is drastically more likely that the reader either knows it already or is not interested, as opposed to things that are, say, less than a month old. Especially if that information was reposted constantly, as that logic would allow.
  - mwfunk 13y ago
    If it's getting upvoted, then by definition it's interesting to people. It's not new but it's still relevant, and having a discussion about it on HN 5 years later is certainly new, which was probably the intent.
  - scott_s 13y ago
    Then we must conclude that "Hacker News" is not strictly a "news" site.
  - Jtsummers 13y ago
    Along with being a news site this is also a discussion site. If the article is new to the reader or leads to discussion that interests the reader, then they're free to upvote it. When it's not, they can ignore it (or flag it if it truly doesn't belong). It's really that simple. When links get posted that have no relevance to you, just move on. Post links that are relevant to your interests or wait for someone else to do it for you.
mpyne 13y ago
It's as right now as it was 5 years ago, and has a lot of corrolary with other customer-facing, resource-constrained software maintenance environments that you might see from a YC participant. And I say this as a Linux user who doesn't use PulseAudio...

TallGuyShort 13y ago

>> If you try to deliver both at once you have to also deliver a way of switching between the two. I would argue instead that Linux is about freedom. In other words, rather than expecting my distro to go out of its way to provide multiple choices and a way of switching between those choices, I expect it to not go out of its way to prevent me from switching if I chooose to, even if switching is difficult, and even if it needs to warn me that what I'm about to do is a bad idea.

bifrost 13y ago

I'm not sure what this thread is about frankly. It reeks of "ooh, linux is great because its !somethingelse" that used to pervade academia and a lot of the industry. Frankly that still pervades but there's finally more substance behind "Linux" as a whole. For a lot of newbies "Linux" was their first experience with a unix-like system, so they either loved it or were made to use it and became familiar with it. Thats not particularly a bad thing but it results in this rampant fanboyism thats kinda annoying to someone who was using other systems beforehand. So yeah, you get "choice" with Linux, but you get it with a bunch of other operating systems too, you just have to do a different amount of work. There are plenty of things that are not easier in Linux, but really its all about tradeoffs.

benihana 13y ago
>I'm not sure what this thread is about frankly. Make a decision, even if it's difficult and even if it will piss off your users. Don't defer the making of a decision to the user and hide behind "choice"

frozenport 13y ago

Big distros don't use Linux how Linux developers use Linux. The guys that write Linux software always have the latest version and test against them. Once I switched to Gentoo I have a rock solid system with the latest and greatest software packages. Every week I update all my software and my laptop has been running on the same install for 2 years, with Ubuntu some random nonsense would fail every 6 months and with SUSE you would be using GCC from the stone age.

IanChiles 13y ago
Gentoo and Arch are wonderful for staying absolutely up to date. Far better IMO than anything else - but for anything production wise or mission critical, nothing comes close to Debian, RHEL/CentOS, and SuSe

mwfunk 13y ago

I don't think Linux is about anything (and that includes intangibles like "choice" or "freedom"). It's an open source kernel that a bunch of people hack on, that's it. The traditional Linux distro model is about choice, but that was from necessity, not design. Android and Ubuntu and others have shown that there's a whole spectrum of OS's with varying degrees of specific design and policy that you can build on top of the Linux kernel and specific pieces of the traditional Linux userland stack. I don't think any one of these things is the right way to do a Linux-based system, I just see all of that software as the primordial ooze that various OS's arise out of. There was a local minimum in the late '90s and early 2000s in which most of the distros were trying to do the same thing in different ways and remain more or less compatible with each other, but these days there's a lot more willingness to actually try to design complete systems, which include things like UI policies and standard libraries that limit their compatibility with other systems. I think this is great- the traditional distro model is still going strong via Debian and Slackware and so on, but I'm glad that people are thinking about Linux in new and more specific ways as well. (EDIT: typo)

bkor 13y ago
The article is not about the kernel, but about delivering something people can use and expect that it works. So not just a kernel itself. Fairly common to call that Linux, even if technically it is just the kernel (and IMO GNU/Linux is "urgh").

es20641 13y ago

I don't really follow this argument. "... because there are so many kinds of cars you can buy that cars are about choice." The "Choice" part of Linux doesn't come into play so much when you are "shopping for a distro", it's the fact that if there is something you don't like the spoiler on your distro, you can switch to another. Heck, you can even build the distro from the ground up and choose EVERYTHING in it.

GhotiFish 13y ago

Yup, no one could disagree with this sentiment. Nuke old useless features, if you have new better ways of doing things, and they actually are better, that's awesome. Do that As long as you actually DO have a better way to do things.

zokier 13y ago

I think Linux is kinda about choice (as a base building block for your own OS). And distros are out there to make those choices so that I don't have to.

noonespecial 13y ago

Part of the problem is that linux isn't linux the way windows is windows, and people expect it to be.

MostAwesomeDude 13y ago

Ctrl+F "ajax" isn't finding anything, so... The poster here goes by "ajax" on more useful communication channels (i.e. IRC). He's one of the most competent hackers I've ever been able to work with, and his ethos comes through loud and clear here: If code is broken, fix it. If code is being misused, stop abusing it. If code is missing, write it.

slashclee 13y ago
You're forgetting perhaps the most powerful ethos of ajax: If the code can be deleted, nuke it.

pixelmonkey 13y ago

"Software is hard. The way to fix it is to fix it, not sweep it under the rug." Love this line. Been thinking a lot about this as I work on scaling a large-ish SaaS product that has been in the market for 18 months. One other interesting dynamic: sales teams always think it's better to add things than to remove things (after all, you can't sell the things you remove), which I now realize is partially the reason many enterprise software packages feel "bloated" over time.

nrivadeneira 13y ago
"One other interesting dynamic: sales teams always think it's better to add things than to remove things (after all, you can't sell the things you remove), which I now realize is partially the reason many enterprise software packages feel "bloated" over time." I'm experiencing exactly this. It's like they want to have every feature to be able to whip out for every type of customer. They dread the circumstance where they have to say "Sorry, we don't do that."
- gizzlon 13y ago
  Well, they often work on commission..
  - nrivadeneira 13y ago
    True, but in the case of startups with limited dev resources, bloat adds to development and maintenance cost. Poor management of resources like that could mean trouble for a startup.

justsee 13y ago

This was an entertaining talk from CCC in 2011 on desktop Linux. 'datenwolf' was the speaker, and he starts talking about sound in Linux here. [1] He's quickly interrupted by the maintainer of PulseAudio, and this interruption continues throughout the talk. My takeaway was that if there was still this amount of confusion and misunderstanding in the community, my frustrating experiences with sound in desktop Ubuntu was not atypical of dekstop Linux users. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0#t=11m http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0#t=11m

vinkelhake 13y ago
Wolfgang 'datenwolf' Draxinger later, in true Bender-style, started his own audio system [1]. The creator of JACK had some comments [2]. They also went head to head in a thread on phoronix around that time. [1] http://klang.eudyptula.org http://klang.eudyptula.org [2] https://community.ardour.org/pd_on_klang https://community.ardour.org/pd_on_klang
makomk 13y ago
PulseAudio decided - as it does - to turn my headphone volume up to 100% when that video started playing. Gotta love audio on Linux!
- bkor 13y ago
  Are you sure it is PulseAudio? In case of multiple outputs (headphones, speakers), PulseAudio can change volumes of them based on data from ALSA. Intention is that volume stays the same, except if the data from ALSA is wrong. Even with one output wrong info from ALSA will result in sudden volume changes.
bkor 13y ago
Your takeaway should be that the speaker is very confused and got a lot of things totally wrong. The presentation is not about PulseAudio, it is about various stacks. The amount of things he states that are just wrong is unbelievable. Lennart is pointing out all the flaws. It has been suggested that this somehow is an attack. IMO, if a talk need that much correcting, something is wrong with the talk. Anyway, one confused speaker is not representive of a community.

marshray 13y ago

Who is this redhat.com and why should I care what color their fedora is? Of course I'm being a quite facetious here. But the point is that I have many computers and VMs running several operating systems, many with Linux kernels, but somehow I've not chosen the Red Fedora. I wasn't aware they even cared that much about desktop users. Perhaps I have the "disease which strangles the mind"?

bkor 13y ago
You should investigate how much Red Hat contributes all over Linux. Server side, but also loads of components used by various desktops. Not knowing about the huge contributions makes it overdue to investigate.
- marshray 13y ago
  I do know, which is why I said I was being facetious. My point was that it's ironic for them to be talking about reducing user choice when somehow given all their contributions to Linux I'd not chosen to use their system anyway.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

antihero 13y ago

Yes, but when we get to things like Gnome and KDE, the ability to choose to run far far away from them is a very very good thing.