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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 functi

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 14y ago
No, sound is not a problem on Linux. I wonder if it ever was actually.
- rayiner 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
      You got lucky with your hardware; nothing more. Sound in Linux has been a living nightmare.
- dscrd 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
    Which distro? What sound hardware?
  - bkor 14y ago
    Skype works out of the box with PulseAudio. No setup or settings required.
- pmahoney 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
    Then all the answers about "Unity isn't so bad, because you can switch away from it" become void.
    - glesica 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
    probably dmix
- quasive 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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_ 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
And it still is a failure.
mayhew 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.

kfk 14y ago

No, sound is not a problem on Linux. I wonder if it ever was actually.

rayiner 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
    You got lucky with your hardware; nothing more. Sound in Linux has been a living nightmare.
dscrd 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
  Which distro? What sound hardware?
- bkor 14y ago
  Skype works out of the box with PulseAudio. No setup or settings required.
pmahoney 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
  Then all the answers about "Unity isn't so bad, because you can switch away from it" become void.
  - glesica 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
  probably dmix
quasive 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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_ 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago

And it still is a failure.

mayhew 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.