LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess [LWN.net]

LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

Posted Sep 19, 2008 22:11 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess by einstein
Parent article: LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

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.

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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...