Bully or not, please be friendlier. I will start and hope you're following.
I've seen a few interviews with Mr. Pöttering and I admire his cleverness and his ambitious fight for a better GNU/Linux. I am not a fan of his person, nor his speech, but this is not the time, nor place to call him an egocentric elitist. There is a reason for everything, I too would become such a person to protect myself from the everyday threatening and hatred. Things like that break a person!! Keep this in mind, we as Engineers are especially very susceptible and sensible to attacks, because we have sharpened and trained our minds to try to find a meaning behind every action.
Remember Aaron Schwartz! He couldn't bear the weight on his shoulders anymore. He was not a soldier, he was not a criminal, he was like you and me a person that deserves to be respected. Souls break apart and suicide isn't rare among our people. You shall keep this in mind, when you speak up without a filter.
Whenever I've been complaining about something about Linux, I was told to improve it, or shut up. That was a culture that I thought as very unfriendly, but it was nonetheless logical. I could pass that along to you, but you have an opinion about Systemd and Pulseaudio that I simply cannot fathom as authentic or fact based.
ALSA did not allow controlling the volume of different applications. Period. PulseAudio made it happen!! Yes it's not perfect, but it's opensource and maybe it'll be as good as the software you want to use on your own computer.
With Systemd systems are starting up much much faster than tweaks to other init systems can provide. You're comparing Apples to Oranges, when you say, but if you disable everything then and only then my favorite init system is faster than systemd. Not everything in systemd is smart or good, but it fixes a problem that people have neglected for too many years. Systemd changed that!
Let's not discuss what is better or not, you have to be a Software-Architect and not an untrained Software-Developer to discuss such things in detail without being a hypocrite, desinformative or misleading. My impression was that even though the ideas of Mr. Pöttering were brilliant, his Software-Architecture skills are his Achilles heel. That's what he needs more training in.
>but you have an opinion about Systemd and Pulseaudio that I simply cannot fathom as authentic or fact based.
You criticize people for being unfriendly and then say you "simply cannot fathom" that their opinions are authentic?
How long have you been using Linux? PulseAudio was almost universally major pain point for many years until other people came along and fixed Poettering's work up enough to make it marginally better than ALSA. If you "simply cannot fathom" that the poster's opinions are authentic, you have been living under a rock.
I thought engineering and "science" was supposed to be a place for objectivity and fact-based reasoning, not pathos and let's-not-hurt-each-other's-feelings-with-criticism.
> PulseAudio was almost universally major pain point for many years
The operative word here is was.
ALSA had a lot of problems for my use case, Pulseaudio just works. Most of this is probably more due to other contributors and just generally distributions getting their act together, but the world we live in today is undoubtedly better than it was before Pulseaudio.
What about the counterfactual where Pulseaudio was never started?
It is often said that the best way to get a correct answer to a question on the internet is not to ask the question, but to post a wrong answer. It seems to me that what Poettering is doing is the exact same thing applied to open source software, and I for one am grateful for it.
> It is often said that the best way to get a correct answer to a question on the internet is not to ask the question, but to post a wrong answer. It seems to me that what Poettering is doing is the exact same thing applied to open source software, and I for one am grateful for it.
That's an interesting way to look at it, and I think you're right. He's coming up with what he sees as a solution to something that, while it isn't broken, isn't great either (in the case of systemd, other init systems work but they all have shortcomings), only this time I think it backfired. Now the "wrong answer" as you put it, is being implemented by the major distros except Slackware and Gentoo, and I fear that it's gotten to the point that it can only be fixed by being surgically removed and replaced with something else, which may end up being even worse.
My personal solution is to stick with non-systemd distros, for others it's grimace and bear it, and for many it's not a problem in the first place.
My experience with JACK seems very similar to everyone else's early experience with PulseAudio, really buggy, lots of audio pops (small buffers) or latency (big buffers).
One of my most technically adept friends has spent a long time trying to setup a basic debian install with JACK working reliably (done) only it's very fragile, upgrades to random packages broke it so often we now do our audio work without a general purpose computer in the hotpath.
If your friend is using Debian, may I suggest the kxstudio repos [1]? They make JACK (1 or 2) easy as pie to deal with. I personally use Arch nowadays, and breakage after upgrading hasn't been a concern for quite some time.
First, calling someone egocentric and elitist is not an attack, it's an observation, and in this case, an apt one. He has said so about himself in the past. My intent isn't to attack him, it's to describe him.
Second, he is not Aaron Schwartz, who the community rallied around and the government bullied to death. In this case, the government isn't even involved, it's various groups of people reacting differently to Pottering, some in ways that I find disgusting, others in ways that I line up with (not happy with him or his work, but not attacking him for it), and still others like you with blind praise and faith bordering on religion.
"You're comparing Apples to Oranges, when you say, but if you disable everything then and only then my favorite init system is faster than systemd."
I never said that, please don't attempt to put words in my mouth to bolster your argument, because it makes you look quite the fool.
"Let's not discuss what is better or not, you have to be a Software-Architect and not an untrained Software-Developer to discuss such things in detail without being a hypocrite, desinformative or misleading."
You're making an assumption about me while knowing nothing about me, and at the same time calling me a hypocrite? Please, you're shooting yourself in the foot with this one.
There is simply nothing defensible in your entire argument, as far as I can see. You make assumptions, call me names including "hypocrite", telling me how to think ("You shall keep this in mind, when you speak up without a filter")? Sounds to me like you're just as much a bully as Pottering. It renders your entire argument invalid; you may as well be calling yourself out.
Bully or not, please be friendlier. I will start and hope you're following.
I've seen a few interviews with Mr. Pöttering and I admire his cleverness and his ambitious fight for a better GNU/Linux. I am not a fan of his person, nor his speech, but this is not the time, nor place to call him an egocentric elitist. There is a reason for everything, I too would become such a person to protect myself from the everyday threatening and hatred. Things like that break a person!! Keep this in mind, we as Engineers are especially very susceptible and sensible to attacks, because we have sharpened and trained our minds to try to find a meaning behind every action.
Remember Aaron Schwartz! He couldn't bear the weight on his shoulders anymore. He was not a soldier, he was not a criminal, he was like you and me a person that deserves to be respected. Souls break apart and suicide isn't rare among our people. You shall keep this in mind, when you speak up without a filter.
Whenever I've been complaining about something about Linux, I was told to improve it, or shut up. That was a culture that I thought as very unfriendly, but it was nonetheless logical. I could pass that along to you, but you have an opinion about Systemd and Pulseaudio that I simply cannot fathom as authentic or fact based.
ALSA did not allow controlling the volume of different applications. Period. PulseAudio made it happen!! Yes it's not perfect, but it's opensource and maybe it'll be as good as the software you want to use on your own computer.
With Systemd systems are starting up much much faster than tweaks to other init systems can provide. You're comparing Apples to Oranges, when you say, but if you disable everything then and only then my favorite init system is faster than systemd. Not everything in systemd is smart or good, but it fixes a problem that people have neglected for too many years. Systemd changed that!
Let's not discuss what is better or not, you have to be a Software-Architect and not an untrained Software-Developer to discuss such things in detail without being a hypocrite, desinformative or misleading. My impression was that even though the ideas of Mr. Pöttering were brilliant, his Software-Architecture skills are his Achilles heel. That's what he needs more training in.
Thank you for taking the time reading this.