good points

Posted Apr 2, 2016 16:01 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: good points by h2
Parent article: Ubuntu on Windows

I just wish linux kernel devs would learn what stable means

What do you mean? Kernel devs know that very well and follow the mantra religiously. Linus just reasserted that if it does break anything, it needs to be turned off by default. That's a hard rule.

Pehaps you mean that thing? This part is not a problem - and, surprisingly enough, Microsoft and Windows help to highlight that very well, indeed. Old applications work quite well on Windows. Old drivers? Not so much. It was common to lose support for WinModems and WinPrinters, scanners and other random hardware with Windows upgrades. I have quite a collection of old hardware - and I'm forced to keep Windows XP and Windows 98 (sic! Winows98) around to use it. Stable API just does not work for the hardware.

The same is true for MacOS, Solaris and all other OSes (including Linux). Linux developers explicitly don't care, others do care, but the end result is the same: obsolete, unsupported driver are lottery with all of them. It's just simple as that. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't work. Sometimes they could be easily upgraded. Sometimes it's impossible to do.

We may discuss the question “why?” for a long time (I have some ideas but have no way to verify them), but in the end it does not matter: stable API works in userspace, but it does not work for drivers. It's just a fact. Kernel developers are not to blame. This particular sin is not a problem for Linux.

good points

Posted Apr 4, 2016 21:15 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (7 responses)

> Pehaps you mean that thing? This part is not a problem - and, surprisingly enough, Microsoft and Windows help to highlight that very well, indeed. Old applications work quite well on Windows. Old drivers? Not so much. It was common to lose support for WinModems and WinPrinters, scanners and other random hardware with Windows upgrades.

Actually, linux RARELY loses support for old hardware. If Win98 WinModems and WinPrinters were supported by Linux of that era, then they are still supported by the latest linux 4 unless nobody bothered to complain when they were accidentally broken (which is quite likely :-). Linux support stays around for as long as users complain (and help debug) when it gets accidentally broken.

Cheers,
Wol

good points

Posted Apr 5, 2016 8:48 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (6 responses)

Well, when pulseaudio was introduced, Linux definitely lost support for lots of hardware. Maybe got back later, I didn't wait to find out.

On the other hand I do remember that I had to use a 3rd party bttv driver on WinXP in order to use my AverMedia98 TV capture card. So this is definitely a problem, only mitigated by the relative infreqency of releases (5 releases in 15 years, compared to 23 Ubuntu versions in shorter time).

good points

Posted Apr 6, 2016 7:33 UTC (Wed) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (5 responses)

"Well, when pulseaudio was introduced, Linux definitely lost support for lots of hardware."

By all means explain to the wider audience how the linux kernel lost support for a lots of hardware when pulseaudio got introduced.

I'm looking forward to hear that explanation.

good points

Posted Apr 6, 2016 7:46 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (4 responses)

It's simple. Before pulseaudio was introduced, I could listen to music, record from my TV card, etc., could do all the stuff I expect from an audio card. After pulseaudio was introduced, none of it worked. The audio card practically became junk (under Linux). Maybe the audio support recovered since, but I'm afraid Lennart Poettering's reputation never.

good points

Posted Apr 6, 2016 8:18 UTC (Wed) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] (3 responses)

> After pulseaudio was introduced, none of it worked.

Pulseaudio's introduction didn't make any of the existing audio systems disappear or stop working so this is obviously false.

good points

Posted Apr 6, 2016 8:54 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (2 responses)

So you know better than me what worked on my system and what didn't. And I do remember that many people had the same experience, see e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug...

good points

Posted Apr 6, 2016 11:16 UTC (Wed) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

Sure, the defaults were broken, but broken defaults is a fact of life in Linux distros, especially around that time period which was particularly turbulent. PA wasn't required though, nor even hard to remove; you could always just uninstall it and get sound back - I know that's what I did after every update for a couple of years.

I do feel your pain though - the nightmare year of 2008 was when I started my transition to using Windows on the desktop. PA still wasn't production-ready by the time I'd switched full-time.

good points

Posted Apr 6, 2016 12:07 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I used Fedora 9 from its Alpha stage (KDE4 was at 4.0.3) and it was (one of, if not the) the first to include PulseAudio. Things were…rough, but it went well enough (was helping the KDE SIG at the time). By Fedora 10 and almost certainly 11, I had stopped having PA issues (well except flat-volumes, but that is an easy fix). However, Ubuntu continued having systemic problems for up to 18 months afterwards. Whether it was due to older kernels not shipping with the driver fixes, older ALSA libraries not getting the bridging right, problems with the default configurations, whatever, I don't know for sure, but as far as I can tell, most of people's problems were the result of Ubuntu botching it up on their end; Fedora showed that the right pieces were available, maybe just not according to Ubuntu's update policies (but no, can't fix things because the new release contains an unacceptable version bump nevermind it might fix 100 bugs in the process).

These days, I keep an instance of mpv streaming music whenever I'm at work and if I need to start using the webcam, start to watch another video, listen to other audio files, I just mute the stream and start the other program. No audio device locking problems, I can reroute audio while programs are running, and none of the problems people complain about today from their experiences 5+ years ago.