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LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Posted Sep 19, 2008 14:24 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
In reply to: LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess by drag
Parent article: LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Well, the youtube problem was just one too many. It used to work with Gutsy, didn't work with Hardy. Turning off pulseaudio didn't solved the problem and the audio wasn't in sync with other flash players.

Actually the browser window problem didn't affect me, because I use tabbed browsing, just one window which I don't close.


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LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Posted Sep 19, 2008 14:47 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

I understand what your saying. It's too bad because more and more common to see experienced Linux users switching to Mac or Windows-based systems because they've just plain gotten tired of hacking around the same problems over and over and over and over again.

The Linux desktop experience is much more buggy and crash happy then Windows nowadays. People need to learn that having the source code is not a acceptable substitution for binary compatibility and good quality control mechanisms. It hurts open source software just as much as closed source stuff.

LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Posted Sep 19, 2008 18:06 UTC (Fri) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link]

> The Linux desktop experience is much more buggy and crash happy then Windows nowadays.

LOL, I don't think so - although, who knows - I haven't run windows for some time, does it not crash anymore? Wow, that would be one for the books.

The linux desktop with pulseaudio has been working well for me (suse 11.0 at home, ubuntu hardy heron at work) but then again, perhaps my sound hardware is blase? (intel built-in) I do the usual, some web browsing, some gaming, some movies, some music. Other than a wrapper script that I needed for my 9 year old copy of quake 3 arena, everything just seems to work, out of the box.

Alternative for Adobe Flash users

Posted Sep 19, 2008 18:40 UTC (Fri) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

Don't know about anyone else but I have replaced Adobe Flash on my main laptop with Gnash. When I started running it this spring, it played YouTube usually, other Flash video sites almost never. Now YouTube always works and other Flash video sites work sometimes. Not ready for Grandma yet, but I'm not a big net video watcher and don't play Flash games much, so close enough for me.

Alternative for Adobe Flash users

Posted Sep 20, 2008 10:08 UTC (Sat) by DonDiego (subscriber, #24141) [Link]

What about Gnash's speed? Adobe Flash is already incredibly and annoyingly slow, will I have to invest in new hardware to run it? Yes, I still happily use a 500MHz PC...

Alternative for Adobe Flash users

Posted Sep 20, 2008 19:04 UTC (Sat) by jlokier (subscriber, #52227) [Link]

I ran Gnash on my Ubuntu Handy install for a few months - and it worked ok, and played Youtube videos for a while. But after a while it stopped playing Youtube and all other videos - it would just sit there with a spinner.

So I had to remove Gnash and replace it with the original Adobe Flash plugin.

(Unfortunately although there's a straightforward UI from Firefox asking which Flash plugin you'd like to install (I'd picked Gnash), there seemed to be no UI for removing or changing it.)

Disable Flash in the Browser

Posted Sep 25, 2008 13:12 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

Install both and then disable one with Tools/Add-ons/Plugins in Firefox 3?

LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Posted Sep 19, 2008 22:11 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Windows never crash? Well, it doesn't bluescreen much anymore, but it's
still deadlock-prone, especially if it loses network connections.

e.g. the backup domain controller went down at work today (our desktops
are Windows XP *sigh*). Within seconds *everything* on *everyone's*
desktop had frozen. Even my VNC and X sessions were stalled. Most of the
mouse pointers had frozen (but not all), and ctrl-alt-del did nothing.
Even the primary domain controller froze. It all stayed stalled until both
the primary and backup domain controllers were simultaneously rebooted.

That's robustness for you. (If everything's frozen solid, it can't crash.)

The time was when heavily-interlinked NFS systems could do that in the
Unix world, but I haven't seen anything like it for many years, and even
at its worst Unix gave you more tools to diagnose it than roomfuls of
simultaneously-frozen boxes. In some ways Windows is going *backwards*,
even before you look at the Vista trainwreck.

It's not the only mess

Posted Sep 21, 2008 10:07 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

But still it is true that the Windows desktop has advanced a lot in that respect: my corporate w2k desktop has not frozen once in a year. Mac OS X has similarly become a lot more robust in the intervening years since I stopped using it. Meanwhile Linux (and its many variants) regularly breaks hardware compatibility, shows multiple regressions and makes you play with your kernel every once in a while.

Maybe I'm biased because I use only debian testing, and maybe Mandriva or Suse are better. And of course there are areas where it excels (such as performance and support for older hardware). But I'm not sure there aren't at least some engineering reasons for the lack of quality. Windows or Mac OS X have one wireless API well thought from the beginning, and most gadgets work fine with it (while Linux still struggles with common wireless chips). More to the point, they have not had two major rewrites of their sound systems in a few years (ALSA and PulseAudio).

Things should just work, and once they are working they should just keep working, without excuses.

LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Posted Sep 21, 2008 20:29 UTC (Sun) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

The time was when heavily-interlinked NFS systems could do that in the Unix world

This is very much present tense at my workplace...

LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Posted Sep 21, 2008 23:57 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

'-o bg' solves most of that these days :)

LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Posted Sep 21, 2008 22:55 UTC (Sun) by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103) [Link]

The flash crash happens when you close a Flash animation (i.e. usually change/close a web site), not when you close a window.

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