4 ms·

Is there anything concrete in terms of 'drivers' and 'flaky', 'more fundamental features' which you can point to as being a problem for you? Personally I've be

Is there anything concrete in terms of 'drivers' and 'flaky', 'more fundamental features' which you can point to as being a problem for you? Personally I've been using a bleeding edge distro (Arch Linux) for the past 5-6 years or so and I've only been bitten once by a stability issue with networking which forced me to downgrade the kernel while it was being fixed upstream (this would not have bitten me had I not been using a bleeding edge distro btw). And I certainly don't have to spend all my time 'tied to the computer to get shit working', since Arch is bare-bones it certainly took more time to set it up exactly to my liking, but that's not something I have to spend time on anymore. Instead I spend far too much time here on HN :D

balabaster 13y ago
I could write a laundry list of things, but like you, I'm too busy wasting time on Hacker News... when really I should go back to trying to research how to fix them :P
derekp7 13y ago
Actually, I've got a couple of things that flaked out on me in the last year or so. This was with Fedora 17, on a Lenovo Thinkpad x230 laptop, and Intel video. At first I put Ubuntu on it, but it wouldn't reliably survive suspend/resume, and sometimes X11 would lock up (this is because the chipset used in this laptop was band new at the time, and driver support was still a bit flaky). So I put Fedora 17 on it, and got a bit better luck. However, after a few automatic updates, I started to get really weird sound issues. When playing videos with VLC, I would get a buzzing sound (like a broken speaker) for the first minute or so, then it would clear up -- this only happened sometimes, after a suspend / resume. Reverting to an earlier kernel fixed it, but also I couldn't duplicate the issue with any other audio program -- just VLC. Eventually (after a couple months), the various libraries, software components, and kernel versions stabilized on this hardware, and now suspend/resume, audio, etc are all flawless. But I know I'm probably in for some pain next time I upgrade hardware (unless I get last years model). Second problem -- I picked up a generic 7.1 USB audio device. The center channel and subwoofer are reversed. I can't figure out how to re-assign the audio channels through the driver (I think there is some combination of Alsa and Pulse config file tweaks, but haven't got them to work yet). Ideally I'd like to pass some parameters to the kernel module for the sound device to swap channels. I looked at the source code, saw there was a spot where I can add the chipset in the "quirks" table, but couldn't find the data structures that assign audio output to specific channels. I'll probably end up jumping on one of the kernel dev mailing lists to figure that part out when I get time. Meanwhile, I just made an adapter to swap the channels (both the center speaker and sub-woofer come out of the same audio jack on the sound device).

balabaster 13y ago

I could write a laundry list of things, but like you, I'm too busy wasting time on Hacker News... when really I should go back to trying to research how to fix them :P

derekp7 13y ago

Actually, I've got a couple of things that flaked out on me in the last year or so. This was with Fedora 17, on a Lenovo Thinkpad x230 laptop, and Intel video. At first I put Ubuntu on it, but it wouldn't reliably survive suspend/resume, and sometimes X11 would lock up (this is because the chipset used in this laptop was band new at the time, and driver support was still a bit flaky). So I put Fedora 17 on it, and got a bit better luck. However, after a few automatic updates, I started to get really weird sound issues. When playing videos with VLC, I would get a buzzing sound (like a broken speaker) for the first minute or so, then it would clear up -- this only happened sometimes, after a suspend / resume. Reverting to an earlier kernel fixed it, but also I couldn't duplicate the issue with any other audio program -- just VLC. Eventually (after a couple months), the various libraries, software components, and kernel versions stabilized on this hardware, and now suspend/resume, audio, etc are all flawless. But I know I'm probably in for some pain next time I upgrade hardware (unless I get last years model). Second problem -- I picked up a generic 7.1 USB audio device. The center channel and subwoofer are reversed. I can't figure out how to re-assign the audio channels through the driver (I think there is some combination of Alsa and Pulse config file tweaks, but haven't got them to work yet). Ideally I'd like to pass some parameters to the kernel module for the sound device to swap channels. I looked at the source code, saw there was a spot where I can add the chipset in the "quirks" table, but couldn't find the data structures that assign audio output to specific channels. I'll probably end up jumping on one of the kernel dev mailing lists to figure that part out when I get time. Meanwhile, I just made an adapter to swap the channels (both the center speaker and sub-woofer come out of the same audio jack on the sound device).