It's not the only mess

Posted Sep 21, 2008 10:07 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess by nix
Parent article: LPC: Linux audio: it's a mess

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.