6 ms·

You know this is funny, I remember reading comments EXACTLY like this about 3-4 years ago but with pulseaudio in place of systemd. Pulseaudio was Lennart's pre

You know this is funny, I remember reading comments EXACTLY like this about 3-4 years ago but with pulseaudio in place of systemd. Pulseaudio was Lennart's previous project. It broke everything in linux sound for a while, everybody moaned and hated it and said it was the worst thing since the crucifixion of Christ. Yet, name one problem you had with sound on linux in the past year? There are very few. Pulseaudio now just works(tm) and is a unseed, unheard of part of the plumbing. If you remember what is was like messing with ALSA and (shudders) OSS before pulseaudio came along you will agree that the current state of affairs is a million miles better. It used to be really difficult to get more than one application to be able to play sound at a time. I remember compiling sound drivers from source just to get them working. Configuring ALSA config files to get surround sound working was practically a black art. Creating manual scripts that unmute the sound card on every boot because the driver didn't initialize it properly. With pulseaudio, I never have to worry about any of that and configuring surround sound takes me two clicks of the mouse. Lennart did a fantastic job with pulseaudio, he took on a dirty problem that nobody else dared to touch and went through years of criticism to produce a really high quality solution that solved the linux audio problem so well that you don't hear complaints about it anymore. In light of that, I trust him to do a good job with systemd. It'll be a couple of years of everyone moaning and bitching and whining about it, then one day it will have become a seamless part of the plumbing, everyone will take it for granted and wonder how they ever managed fighting with shell scripts and fragmented init systems before systemd came along. It's ironic that Lennart Poettering is probably the most abused developer in the entire OSS ecosystem, yet he is one of the people contributing most to it. For our sake, I'm glad he has such a thick skin. If I was him I'd have quit this game long ago.

aidanhs 12y ago
Let's say PulseAudio is really good now (I can't disagree). It was initially released 10 years ago. So 6-7 years after initial release ("3-4 years ago") it was causing people grief. I'm not sure that's a great vote of confidence for the road ahead of systemd (given that systemd presumably has a bit more to it than PulseAudio). To quote the article, "I do honestly believe this will end up being the start of a rocky period for Linux". Ubuntu 14.04 will keep me happy for ~5 years, then I can take another look at what the current state of things are.
badgersandjam 12y ago
You're entirely right and I've upvoted you. However, with one small caveat: servers don't generally have sound cards so the impact of this was relatively low. There aren't that many desktop Linux users out there. I mean I'm a Unix guy at heart and I'm typing this on a Windows laptop. I've never used Linux on the desktop and probably never will. Now servers do have init processes and we don't really want to spend the next 3-4 years being guinea pigs. I'm quite happy for the vendors to do this behind the scenes or offer it as an alternative but we've got an RHEL+CentOS release with systemd in it already and a Debian with systemd in it just around the corner. A pulseaudio situation, even for 6 months, will result in no small amount of chaos. I do indeed remember times before even ALSA when you had to pay OSS for drivers for your turtle beach card etc. But that's in the distant past, not right now and of little relevance. Windows was fine on the desktop then as well and the sound worked fine out of the box.
- josteink 12y ago
  > I mean I'm a Unix guy at heart and I'm typing this on a Windows laptop. I've never used Linux on the desktop and probably never will. Then you're not really a Unix guy at heart. At home, all I run is Linux, including the laptop my non-geeky wife uses. For me it was a hard choice. I knew she would object because it would be "different" and she's not really interested in learning a gazillion different computing-systems, but on the flip side it meant it was simpler, quicker and less work for me to maintain the computers at home. Once setup things just work, and ensuring everything (including flash and other vulnerability vectors) is up to date is one apt-get upgrade away.
rogerbinns 12y ago
> Yet, name one problem you had with sound on linux in the past year? A month ago with Ubuntu 14.04 - paired with a bluetooth speaker, but would not send any audio to it (A2DP) without any indication as to how to diagnose or correct the issue.
needs 12y ago
Hey, pulseaudio still does not work for me and when it rarely manage to get out some sound, my CPU is over 10%.
onli 12y ago
Pulseaudio still has problems. Sound suddenly being muted, it using the wrong alsamixer settings, sound being garbled until you pass in arcance settings or change it back to Alsa. Granted, the error might be more in part of the rest of the ecosystem, though I doubt it. But it is sadly far from "just use pulseaudio and everything will work instantly". And if it works, there is no need to think that Alsa alone wouldn't have worked as well, the configuration was way less brittle and cumbersome than it is described now. Mostly it just worked. It is only since 14.04 that you have a small chance that opting to use pulseaudio is the better choice. Just trying to get Skype working (which uses pulseaudio) cost me 2 hours last week, which is not at all nice when you have a call starting in 5 minutes.
- diltonm 12y ago
  Strange I don't see the issues you're talking about I use Ubuntu Desktop on a variety of desktops and laptops. I'd say PA was stable by Ubuntu 12.04. I do Skype and Google Talkplugin (now Hangouts).
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    Try using it with JACK and setting up a DAW.. then you'll see the pain.
    - baldfat 12y ago
      Thanks you just ruined my Friday remembering those days!!!!
    - tripzilch 12y ago
      I've had success by adding these four pre/post startup/stop scripts to qJackCtl: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Examples#The_new_way https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Examples#The... In particular for problems of getting Youtube (or any browser audio) to work while other apps use JACK directly. Although on a recent new install it seemed to work without them as well. One problem is I need to start/stop the qJackCtl thing every time my laptop comes back from sleep, to get sound working again. There must be a way to automate (or, preferably, fix) this, right? Anyone know?
coffeeaddicted 12y ago
I checked out several free synthesizers recently on an Ubuntu system. None worked on first try. Thought I got half of them working after a while (the others would have needed JACK). On my Debian system youtube videos stop playing sound once in a while (video continues), thought I suppose it's not pulseaudio's fault (so just a general sound problem). You asked ;-) (I still agree with you that it got better than it once was)
diltonm 12y ago
>> Pulseaudio was Lennart's previous project. It broke everything in linux sound for a while, everybody moaned and hated it I've been with Ubuntu since 2007 and went through the PA transition. I agree it is so much better now. Changing audio sources is easy and faster than on Windows 7. By Ubuntu 12.04 this was stable for me. Like changing from speakers to headsets for a meeting, smooth with PA at least on Ubuntu. Until PA I never thought I'd see audio united on Linux.
justincormack 12y ago
Audio in my Lenovo with Ubuntu is completely erratic. Not going to blame this on Lennart, but it is certainly not a fixed problem. I liked Alsa, though I was working with high end hardware at that point.
tenfingers 12y ago
Up to this day, while libpulse0 is required by some package, I have no pulsed running. Everything is using alsa directly, and I'm using jack for audio work. The impact of pulseaudio is way lower than systemd, and never actually impacted anyone producing music that have no reason to use use a pulseaudio sink. Notably, the audio layer is (in)famous to be able to route anything through anything. Contrast to systemd, where sysadmins actually have now limited choice to many parts of the system (not only init!).
fit2rule 12y ago
Your pulseaudio example is naive, because this: pulseaudio broke audio for many professionals who were already using JACK and ALSA. This is why the upheaval is criticized.. Whats being done to improve things caters only to a low common denominator; it doesn't push the state of the art forward.
near 12y ago
> Yet, name one problem you had with sound on linux in the past year? That's just it. Linux sound worked fine for me before Pulseaudio, and FreeBSD sound has always worked perfectly fine for me. In fact, FreeBSD solved sound mixing sooner via /dev/pcm virtualization (while Linux chose to create the Linux-only ALSA instead), and has always had lower observed latency. Pulseaudio screwed up my audio so badly that for a year I was running the closed source OSSv4 binaries and manually recompiling all the audio libraries to use OSS instead of ALSA/Pulse. It is not fantastic to push horribly broken code onto the entire Linux userbase while others frantically jump in to help patch and fix the trainwreck. And we're doing the same thing again with systemd. Instead of having a few years where users can choose between systemd, sysvinit, openrc or upstart, while all of the major bugs are worked out, we're being forced immediately from sysvinit (Wheezy) to systemd (Jessie). I was on Lennart's treadmill with Pulse, I'm not getting on it again with systemd.
- baldfat 12y ago
  WAIT you NEVER had an audio problem in Linux before PulseAudio? I would have said the weakest link in Linux on desktop WAS audio. Now PulseAudio was released into the wild too soon by too many distros BUT it has fundamentally fixed what was HORRIBLE in Linux. (Previously a Sound Engineer and Record Studio owner) BUT I would say that Systemd is extremely stable and not broken. What people are complaining about is the philosophy aspect.
  - near 12y ago
    > WAIT you NEVER had an audio problem in Linux before PulseAudio? To be fair, I didn't say I never had Linux audio issues prior to Pulseaudio (whereas I did say that about FreeBSD.) Back in '98, my SB16 ISA card would only output sound at 8-bit monaural under mikmod, and I could only play CD-audio with that passthrough cable between the CD-ROM drive and the sound card. Once I was able to get sound working well enough, the only way I was able to play MIDIs was through Timidity and Soundfont emulation. And until ALSA, there was obviously pain whenever two things would want to play sound at the same time. This of course was due to the OSSv3 author changing the license before introducing his own audio mixing, and all of those awful sound server daemons (esd et al) never really worked, since there were multiple daemons and each application wanted different daemons or just wanted to stab right at the OSSv3 ioctl's. But once ALSA was established and working, yes. Audio under Linux at that point worked just fine for me. Pulseaudio was a solution looking for a problem. > (Previously a Sound Engineer and Record Studio owner) I won't claim to be either of these. I like to listen to music while I write code, I'll occasionally watch some movies or play some games, and I want Pidgin to make a chime when someone sends me a message. In particular, I'm very sensitive to latency in gaming (emulation), but that's about the extent of what I need speaker sound output for. > What people are complaining about is the philosophy aspect. To me, the worst part is the backroom politics, the complete disregard for portability, and the lock-in effects of consuming other daemons and services, and making software dependent upon it. However, I do also object to the design itself, as well as to the developers responsible for working on the project, and the attitude of disdain they present to the community at large.
aidenn0 12y ago
I still haven't tried pulseaudio; my first interaction with it was so terrible.
dredmorbius 12y ago
Great example except ... I don't have pulseaudio installed on my system. Not even out of any specific effort to avoid it. It may be standard on some systems, but not, apparently on debian (it's an "optional" package). And that's part of the point: stuff that needn't be present shouldn't be. systemd's a whole 'nother ball of wax in that regard. And yes, I'll even allow that Linux audio has been frustrating over the years. But in my case, problems going away had nothing to do with Lennart's work.
throwawayaway 12y ago
pulseaudio is a continuous disaster for me.

aidanhs 12y ago

Let's say PulseAudio is really good now (I can't disagree). It was initially released 10 years ago. So 6-7 years after initial release ("3-4 years ago") it was causing people grief. I'm not sure that's a great vote of confidence for the road ahead of systemd (given that systemd presumably has a bit more to it than PulseAudio). To quote the article, "I do honestly believe this will end up being the start of a rocky period for Linux". Ubuntu 14.04 will keep me happy for ~5 years, then I can take another look at what the current state of things are.

badgersandjam 12y ago

You're entirely right and I've upvoted you. However, with one small caveat: servers don't generally have sound cards so the impact of this was relatively low. There aren't that many desktop Linux users out there. I mean I'm a Unix guy at heart and I'm typing this on a Windows laptop. I've never used Linux on the desktop and probably never will. Now servers do have init processes and we don't really want to spend the next 3-4 years being guinea pigs. I'm quite happy for the vendors to do this behind the scenes or offer it as an alternative but we've got an RHEL+CentOS release with systemd in it already and a Debian with systemd in it just around the corner. A pulseaudio situation, even for 6 months, will result in no small amount of chaos. I do indeed remember times before even ALSA when you had to pay OSS for drivers for your turtle beach card etc. But that's in the distant past, not right now and of little relevance. Windows was fine on the desktop then as well and the sound worked fine out of the box.

josteink 12y ago
> I mean I'm a Unix guy at heart and I'm typing this on a Windows laptop. I've never used Linux on the desktop and probably never will. Then you're not really a Unix guy at heart. At home, all I run is Linux, including the laptop my non-geeky wife uses. For me it was a hard choice. I knew she would object because it would be "different" and she's not really interested in learning a gazillion different computing-systems, but on the flip side it meant it was simpler, quicker and less work for me to maintain the computers at home. Once setup things just work, and ensuring everything (including flash and other vulnerability vectors) is up to date is one apt-get upgrade away.

rogerbinns 12y ago

> Yet, name one problem you had with sound on linux in the past year? A month ago with Ubuntu 14.04 - paired with a bluetooth speaker, but would not send any audio to it (A2DP) without any indication as to how to diagnose or correct the issue.

needs 12y ago

Hey, pulseaudio still does not work for me and when it rarely manage to get out some sound, my CPU is over 10%.

onli 12y ago

Pulseaudio still has problems. Sound suddenly being muted, it using the wrong alsamixer settings, sound being garbled until you pass in arcance settings or change it back to Alsa. Granted, the error might be more in part of the rest of the ecosystem, though I doubt it. But it is sadly far from "just use pulseaudio and everything will work instantly". And if it works, there is no need to think that Alsa alone wouldn't have worked as well, the configuration was way less brittle and cumbersome than it is described now. Mostly it just worked. It is only since 14.04 that you have a small chance that opting to use pulseaudio is the better choice. Just trying to get Skype working (which uses pulseaudio) cost me 2 hours last week, which is not at all nice when you have a call starting in 5 minutes.

diltonm 12y ago
Strange I don't see the issues you're talking about I use Ubuntu Desktop on a variety of desktops and laptops. I'd say PA was stable by Ubuntu 12.04. I do Skype and Google Talkplugin (now Hangouts).
- fit2rule 12y ago
  Try using it with JACK and setting up a DAW.. then you'll see the pain.
  - baldfat 12y ago
    Thanks you just ruined my Friday remembering those days!!!!
  - tripzilch 12y ago
    I've had success by adding these four pre/post startup/stop scripts to qJackCtl: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Examples#The_new_way https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Examples#The... In particular for problems of getting Youtube (or any browser audio) to work while other apps use JACK directly. Although on a recent new install it seemed to work without them as well. One problem is I need to start/stop the qJackCtl thing every time my laptop comes back from sleep, to get sound working again. There must be a way to automate (or, preferably, fix) this, right? Anyone know?

coffeeaddicted 12y ago

I checked out several free synthesizers recently on an Ubuntu system. None worked on first try. Thought I got half of them working after a while (the others would have needed JACK). On my Debian system youtube videos stop playing sound once in a while (video continues), thought I suppose it's not pulseaudio's fault (so just a general sound problem). You asked ;-) (I still agree with you that it got better than it once was)

diltonm 12y ago

>> Pulseaudio was Lennart's previous project. It broke everything in linux sound for a while, everybody moaned and hated it I've been with Ubuntu since 2007 and went through the PA transition. I agree it is so much better now. Changing audio sources is easy and faster than on Windows 7. By Ubuntu 12.04 this was stable for me. Like changing from speakers to headsets for a meeting, smooth with PA at least on Ubuntu. Until PA I never thought I'd see audio united on Linux.

justincormack 12y ago

Audio in my Lenovo with Ubuntu is completely erratic. Not going to blame this on Lennart, but it is certainly not a fixed problem. I liked Alsa, though I was working with high end hardware at that point.

tenfingers 12y ago

Up to this day, while libpulse0 is required by some package, I have no pulsed running. Everything is using alsa directly, and I'm using jack for audio work. The impact of pulseaudio is way lower than systemd, and never actually impacted anyone producing music that have no reason to use use a pulseaudio sink. Notably, the audio layer is (in)famous to be able to route anything through anything. Contrast to systemd, where sysadmins actually have now limited choice to many parts of the system (not only init!).

fit2rule 12y ago

Your pulseaudio example is naive, because this: pulseaudio broke audio for many professionals who were already using JACK and ALSA. This is why the upheaval is criticized.. Whats being done to improve things caters only to a low common denominator; it doesn't push the state of the art forward.

near 12y ago

> Yet, name one problem you had with sound on linux in the past year? That's just it. Linux sound worked fine for me before Pulseaudio, and FreeBSD sound has always worked perfectly fine for me. In fact, FreeBSD solved sound mixing sooner via /dev/pcm virtualization (while Linux chose to create the Linux-only ALSA instead), and has always had lower observed latency. Pulseaudio screwed up my audio so badly that for a year I was running the closed source OSSv4 binaries and manually recompiling all the audio libraries to use OSS instead of ALSA/Pulse. It is not fantastic to push horribly broken code onto the entire Linux userbase while others frantically jump in to help patch and fix the trainwreck. And we're doing the same thing again with systemd. Instead of having a few years where users can choose between systemd, sysvinit, openrc or upstart, while all of the major bugs are worked out, we're being forced immediately from sysvinit (Wheezy) to systemd (Jessie). I was on Lennart's treadmill with Pulse, I'm not getting on it again with systemd.

baldfat 12y ago
WAIT you NEVER had an audio problem in Linux before PulseAudio? I would have said the weakest link in Linux on desktop WAS audio. Now PulseAudio was released into the wild too soon by too many distros BUT it has fundamentally fixed what was HORRIBLE in Linux. (Previously a Sound Engineer and Record Studio owner) BUT I would say that Systemd is extremely stable and not broken. What people are complaining about is the philosophy aspect.
- near 12y ago
  > WAIT you NEVER had an audio problem in Linux before PulseAudio? To be fair, I didn't say I never had Linux audio issues prior to Pulseaudio (whereas I did say that about FreeBSD.) Back in '98, my SB16 ISA card would only output sound at 8-bit monaural under mikmod, and I could only play CD-audio with that passthrough cable between the CD-ROM drive and the sound card. Once I was able to get sound working well enough, the only way I was able to play MIDIs was through Timidity and Soundfont emulation. And until ALSA, there was obviously pain whenever two things would want to play sound at the same time. This of course was due to the OSSv3 author changing the license before introducing his own audio mixing, and all of those awful sound server daemons (esd et al) never really worked, since there were multiple daemons and each application wanted different daemons or just wanted to stab right at the OSSv3 ioctl's. But once ALSA was established and working, yes. Audio under Linux at that point worked just fine for me. Pulseaudio was a solution looking for a problem. > (Previously a Sound Engineer and Record Studio owner) I won't claim to be either of these. I like to listen to music while I write code, I'll occasionally watch some movies or play some games, and I want Pidgin to make a chime when someone sends me a message. In particular, I'm very sensitive to latency in gaming (emulation), but that's about the extent of what I need speaker sound output for. > What people are complaining about is the philosophy aspect. To me, the worst part is the backroom politics, the complete disregard for portability, and the lock-in effects of consuming other daemons and services, and making software dependent upon it. However, I do also object to the design itself, as well as to the developers responsible for working on the project, and the attitude of disdain they present to the community at large.

aidenn0 12y ago

I still haven't tried pulseaudio; my first interaction with it was so terrible.

dredmorbius 12y ago

Great example except ... I don't have pulseaudio installed on my system. Not even out of any specific effort to avoid it. It may be standard on some systems, but not, apparently on debian (it's an "optional" package). And that's part of the point: stuff that needn't be present shouldn't be. systemd's a whole 'nother ball of wax in that regard. And yes, I'll even allow that Linux audio has been frustrating over the years. But in my case, problems going away had nothing to do with Lennart's work.

throwawayaway 12y ago

pulseaudio is a continuous disaster for me.