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Pulseaudio took way too long to get ironed out, IMHO. ALSA was bad in a lot of ways, but was workable. I agree moving forward is good, but the issue with alot o

by forca 12y ago

Pulseaudio took way too long to get ironed out, IMHO. ALSA was bad in a lot of ways, but was workable. I agree moving forward is good, but the issue with alot of OSS software is it's used a replacement for working software when it's not quite ready. PA was not ready for primetime when it was initially released. Everyone knows this. It works fine now after many fixes and considerable time. systemd is the same. A lot of people dislike change and systemd is a radical shift from the init that was. While I still prefer the old init, I'm not shying away from using Debian because of it. What I don't like is the hooks that systemd places into software it has no business touching, like Gnome. Userland software should not be touched by this. Full stop. An init system should do one thing well. Userland software shoudl do what it does well. In too many growing instances, systemd is a requirement for userland software and this should never be.

RVuRnvbM2e 12y ago
> Pulseaudio took way too long to get ironed out, IMHO. Have you considered that a flexible, high-quality OS audio subsystem might be difficult to bang out in one weekend? > ALSA was bad in a lot of ways, but was workable. Are you kidding? Every desktop install before pulseaudio was a crapshoot when it came to audio. > I agree moving forward is good, but the issue with alot of OSS software is it's used a replacement for working software when it's not quite ready. No-one forced anyone to switch to pulseaudio, and has any software ever been perfect in release 0.1? I personally upgraded straight from Debian squeeze (default ALSA) to wheezy (default Pulse) without a single issue, because pulseaudio wasn't integrated until it was stable. > What I don't like is the hooks that systemd places into software it has no business touching, like Gnome. It's not like systemd people sneaked their "hooks" into Gnome. Gnome switched to systemd interfaces (e.g. logind) because they fixed real bugs! > Userland software should not be touched by this. Full stop. It isn't! Developers are just switching because it is better. Wow. This post is a good example of the baseless accusations Lennart has to put up with.
- jusssi 12y ago
  Pulseaudio still needs to be restarted every time an USB headset is plugged in, to get it to work as both input AND output card. EDIT: Other than that, it _does_ work quite well nowadays.
- makomk 12y ago
  With PulseAudio's development methods it'd be difficult to bang out a flexible, high-quality OS audio system in any finite amount of time. For example, they merged a patch in I think 4.0 that was literally incomplete - it changed the undocumented and uncommented internal interface between resamplers and the rest of PulseAudio without updating all of the resampling code to match, so if anything used the non-updated resamplers PulseAudio crashed. Their official volume control app used one of those resamplers; using it caused PulseAudio to crash randomly. This was eventually fixed in 5.0 by reverting the offending change, but of course it came with a bunch of new features of questionable quality. (Not sure if there were any regressions this time around; I gave up trying to track down PulseAudio crashes after that one.)

by forca 12y ago

RVuRnvbM2e 12y ago

> Pulseaudio took way too long to get ironed out, IMHO. Have you considered that a flexible, high-quality OS audio subsystem might be difficult to bang out in one weekend? > ALSA was bad in a lot of ways, but was workable. Are you kidding? Every desktop install before pulseaudio was a crapshoot when it came to audio. > I agree moving forward is good, but the issue with alot of OSS software is it's used a replacement for working software when it's not quite ready. No-one forced anyone to switch to pulseaudio, and has any software ever been perfect in release 0.1? I personally upgraded straight from Debian squeeze (default ALSA) to wheezy (default Pulse) without a single issue, because pulseaudio wasn't integrated until it was stable. > What I don't like is the hooks that systemd places into software it has no business touching, like Gnome. It's not like systemd people sneaked their "hooks" into Gnome. Gnome switched to systemd interfaces (e.g. logind) because they fixed real bugs! > Userland software should not be touched by this. Full stop. It isn't! Developers are just switching because it is better. Wow. This post is a good example of the baseless accusations Lennart has to put up with.

jusssi 12y ago
Pulseaudio still needs to be restarted every time an USB headset is plugged in, to get it to work as both input AND output card. EDIT: Other than that, it _does_ work quite well nowadays.
makomk 12y ago
With PulseAudio's development methods it'd be difficult to bang out a flexible, high-quality OS audio system in any finite amount of time. For example, they merged a patch in I think 4.0 that was literally incomplete - it changed the undocumented and uncommented internal interface between resamplers and the rest of PulseAudio without updating all of the resampling code to match, so if anything used the non-updated resamplers PulseAudio crashed. Their official volume control app used one of those resamplers; using it caused PulseAudio to crash randomly. This was eventually fixed in 5.0 by reverting the offending change, but of course it came with a bunch of new features of questionable quality. (Not sure if there were any regressions this time around; I gave up trying to track down PulseAudio crashes after that one.)