That newfangled Journal thing

Posted Nov 21, 2011 12:45 UTC (Mon) by niner (guest, #26151)
In reply to: That newfangled Journal thing by bferrell
Parent article: That newfangled Journal thing

"As another poster mentioned, to date, this individual hasn't made one bit of code that makes for a significant improvement in system operation and HAS created significant amounts of chaos."

Pulseaudio finally ended 15 years of Linux audio pain for me. It lowered power usage drastically, so I can finally listen to music while on battery without giving it much thought. It finally lets me control different applications' volume seperately. It lets me use a bluetooth headset without the problems this included before. Systemd will finally end the whole damn init script mess and maybe journald will bring an end to hours of wasting time with grep and perl to parse log files.

On the other hand, I can't think of any contribution at all of yours. Could you please remind me of why we have to thank you?

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That newfangled Journal thing

Posted Nov 21, 2011 16:46 UTC (Mon) by bferrell (subscriber, #624) [Link]

Really? OK, My first installation on Linux was my very own back in '93. My next Linux install was in the western network management center for MCI shortly after that. Yes, I know MCI is reviled. Oh well. Anyway ever since then, for nearly 20 years, advocating and supporting the use of Linux for my friends, in business dealings, in every place where it fits and makes things better for people. I suspect your contributions may be similar... Or do you not recognize those as contributions? Are you perhaps implying that unless someone writes well known programs or does high profile work that aren't contributing? At least you're a subscriber.

Just asking

That newfangled Journal thing

Posted Nov 21, 2011 17:41 UTC (Mon) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link] (2 responses)

> Pulseaudio finally ended 15 years of Linux audio pain for me. It lowered power usage drastically, so I can finally listen to music while on battery without giving it much thought.

That was exactly my experience with OSSv4.

The only difference is that it worked the first time I tried it, and it didn't take a couple years of polishing by the distros before it worked "out of the box". And it supports output at all of my card's sampling rates and depths (ALSA couldn't do better than 48@16).

Then again, as a mere user I haven't written any Linux code with worldwide use, so my opinions and observations don't matter.

> On the other hand, I can't think of any contribution at all of yours. Could you please remind me of why we have to thank you?

On a slightly less smart-ass, more serious note, this sort of attitude is a serious (growing?) problem in the Linux community. With Unity, GNOME 3, systemd, pulseaudio, etc. we've seen several recent examples of a fairly large group of users/sysadmins/non-coders saying that they don't like some proposed change or that they think that a new solution is inferior to that which it replaces. In response, a small but very vocal portion of the community turns around and basically belittles them, mocking their views since they haven't written large amounts of popular code.

This is not how we win new users.

This is how we piss off the existing users until they switch platforms.

Microsoft and Apple don't always listen to user suggestions, but at least they don't mock their users when they offer some.

That newfangled Journal thing

Posted Nov 21, 2011 18:36 UTC (Mon) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (1 responses)

"a fairly large group of users/sysadmins/non-coders saying that they don't like some proposed change or that they think that a new solution is inferior to that which it replaces. In response, a small but very vocal portion of the community turns around and basically belittles them, mocking their views since they haven't written large amounts of popular code."

My post was not a repsonse to someone "not liking a proposed change" or "thinking that a new solution is inferior". It was a response to "this individual hasn't made one bit of code that makes for a significant improvement in system operation and HAS created significant amounts of chaos."

If someone claims that Lennart has not contributed any improvement but only created chaos, he really should be prepared to answer a question about his own contributions, which the original poster even did.

That newfangled Journal thing

Posted Nov 22, 2011 23:29 UTC (Tue) by da4089 (subscriber, #1195) [Link]

It's perfectly reasonable to have an informed and valuable opinion without being an author of a widely used piece of software or any other form of contribution.

Attempting to suppress discussion by imposing this sort of constraint suggests only that you lack compelling logical arguments.

Question the "chaos" purportedly created, the relative numbers pro and con, etc. There's plenty of real discussion to be had.