Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Aug 26, 2010 12:18 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
In reply to: Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage by Hknr
Parent article: Systemd and Fedora 14

My attitude to hand-editing configuration files is simple:

The system must allow it.
It should almost never be necessary.

The system should provide tools to make most-or-all commonplace configuration actions, and many less commonplace ones, achievable without using a text editor. If using a text editor to configure the system is necessary, at least one of the following statements is true:

The system's users have unusual requirements not easily predicted by the designers of the autoconfiguration mechanisms and "simplified" manual configuration tools.
The system's configuration has a level of essential complexity high enough that a text editor is the only useful way to configure the system at all, or low enough that you can't plausibly get it wrong in a bad way.
The system is broken.

Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Aug 27, 2010 1:20 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

The other main argument is that hardware is now dynamic.

Here is very common hardware:
* USB headphones with microphones
* USB sound card
* Bluetooth heaphones

Notice how they are all dynamic?

So yeah. Alsa, by itself, can work really well if all you want to do is listen to Flac files over a static configuration... but it's shit if you want to do anything more complicated like:

* play more then one sound simultaneously (I'd like to see you program into your asoundrc file a audio mixer that does not suck)
* use your microphone
* use audio input with more then one application
* Use X11 applications over a network that have audio
* use a USB docking station for your laptop
* use your bluetooth headset
* Be able to switch your bluetooth headset between stereo sound and telephone modes
* configure your laptop's audio output (on the fly) between:
- off
- stereo audio with input
- 4 speaker surround sound
- stereo audio with digital output
- digital output with digital input
* Play your game's audio out through the speakers and then chat with people on your usb headset

And a bunch of other crap people using other OSes take for granted but is nearly impossible to do in Linux with any sort of sanity and when it does works it only works in extremely static and carefully maintained configuration.

And, no, switching to OSS is not going to help any since OSS, even in the newest versions, is less capable and more of a pain in the ass to configure then Alsa is... OH it uses software mixing by default, unlike ancient versions of Alsa. One problem solved and sixty thousand more to go.

Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Sep 6, 2010 16:41 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm sure those things would be lovely, if there was more than 50% chance that the piece of shit would produce any fucking sound at all.

Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Sep 6, 2010 17:10 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I am sure there is 98.7 % chance of sound. Much better than ALSA's 76.5% :-)