this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Keep in mind that it all started 20 years ago with Pulseaudio. Pottering was not really a nice guy (on mailing lists ofc, I don't know him personally) whose software I wanted on my machine.
Problem was never speed or even technical, problem was trust on original author and single-mindedness that they were promoting. Acting like it is the only way forward, so anyone believing in freedom part of free software was against it. Additionally, it was looking like tactics used by proprietary software companies to diminish competition.
It looked scary to some of us, and it still does, even worse is that other software started having it as hard dependency.
All of this looks like it was pushed from one place: Portering and RedHat.
While after 20 years I might have gotten a bit softer, you can imagine that 15 years ago some agresive and arogant guy who had quite a bad habbit of writing (IMHO) stupid opinions wanted to take over my init system... no, I will not let him, not for technical reasons but for principal.
I want solutions to come from community and nice people, even if they are inferior, I will not have pottering's code on my machine so no systemd and no pulseaudio for me, thank you, and for me it is an important choice to have.
Poettering is like Torvalds: gruff when pressed, but not wrong.
PulseAudio is like systemd: dramatically better than what came before, and the subject of a great deal of criticism with no apparent basis in reality.
PulseAudio did expose a lot of ALSA driver bugs early on. That may be the reason for its bad rap. But it's still quite undeserved.
This is a nonsensical argument. Systemd is FOSS. It can and will be forked if that becomes necessary.
Which, in light of recent changes at Red Hat, seems likely to happen soon…
That's because fragmentation among fundamental components like sound servers and process supervisors results in a compatibility nightmare. You really want to go back to the bad old days when video games had to support four different sound servers and the user had to select one with an environment variable? Good riddance to that.
Then you'd best pack your bags and move to something other than Linux, because Linus Torvalds is infamous for his scathing (albeit almost invariably correct) rants.
@argv_minus_one @monobot Pulse Audio is good for a desktop multi-program environment. Its optimized for context switching, however for MIDI applications it has too much latency and you need to use Jack.
@thanhdo @argv_minus_one @monobot What about Pipewire? Doesn’t that combine Pulseaudio und Jack capabilities?
PipeWire is a whole other audio manager that happens to be compatible with PulseAudio and JACK.
Lol, not even close. I am not talking about being harsh for writing stupid code. Nor I want to go 20 years back to proove it to some random person, do it yourself.
Yeah, the same way chrome can be forked. No, software developed like that - in closed room just source being dropped on to community, what happened with PA and SD in the begging no one wants to touch. Gentoo had big problems just maintaing eudev and elogind to enable gnome and some other software to work.
Luckily, it is not important anymore, there is pipewire so I managed to skeep PA completely.
Those sound like perfectly valid reasons to me. Thanks for the illuminating look into it.