Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 7th Jul 2011 17:36 UTC, submitted by vivainio
Linux.FR has an interview with Lennart Poettering of PulseAudio and systemd fame (among others). Regarding PulseAudio: "I can understand why people were upset, but quite frankly we didn't really have another option than to push it into the distributions when we did. While PulseAudio certainly wasn't bug-free when the distributions picked it up the majority of issues were actually not in PulseAudio itself but simply in the audio drivers. PulseAudio's timer-based scheduling requires correct timing information supplied by the audio driver, and back then the drivers weren't really providing that. And that not because the drivers were really broken, but more because the hardware was, and the drivers just lacked the right set of work-arounds, quirks and fixes to compensate for it."
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Member since:2011-03-18
Why? I mean, seriously, why?
Glitch-free audio and reduced power consumption. These are not "sophisticated audio capabilities", these are very basic requirements that a modern audio stack for desktops can't miss and Linux was missing.
Glitch-free audio and reduced power consumption. These are not "sophisticated audio capabilities", these are very basic requirements that a modern audio stack for desktops can't miss and Linux was missing.
I'll grant that glitch-free audio is a requirement for an audio stack, but every Linux box I ever used since '98 had that, with OSS and then ALSA—to the extent of the majority of normal desktops need: like I said, to play some audio files and maybe a nice beep for an error. I don't have any statistics, but I'd be very surprised if most people's usage strays far from that.
I definitely do not grant that reduced power consumption is a "very basic requirement"—all else being equal, it would be nice to have that too. But I'd much rather have an audio stack without it that works than one that uses no power at all since it isn't working.
Member since:2005-07-11
Linux has had glitch free audio since 98? Really? Sure, the transition to PA was annoying as hell, but finally audio just works.
No more fighting the system to be able to have more than one application produce sound at a time.
No more stuttering when the system is under heavy load.
No more rebooting because a file handle didn't get freed up correctly, effectively locking the sound card.
For me, there has historically only been one subsystem more annoying than sound, and that is X, but that got to the "i dont need to think about it" stage way before the audio stack did.
Member since:
2005-07-08
Why? I mean, seriously, why?
Glitch-free audio and reduced power consumption. These are not "sophisticated audio capabilities", these are very basic requirements that a modern audio stack for desktops can't miss and Linux was missing.