Firefox 52.0
Firefox 52.0
Posted Mar 11, 2017 1:03 UTC (Sat) by roc (subscriber, #30627)In reply to: Firefox 52.0 by roc
Parent article: Firefox 52.0
Posted Mar 11, 2017 11:39 UTC (Sat)
by ajmacleod (guest, #1729)
[Link] (8 responses)
It's not just a natural resistance to change, it's deeper - with Windows XP SP2 Microsoft had refined their GUI to a point where it worked well for the vast majority; nobody wanted ME or 98 back, even back then. Since then, MS went on a "modernising" spree that has left many, many people struggling to do with their PCs what they did before; sure it looks "modern" but essentially nobody wanted that.
With Open Source Software this kind of thing has also gone on - witness the Gnome 3 idiocy - but we've been free to laugh at it and carry on using any of the multitude of solid alternatives like WindowMaker. Now though, there's a distinct change of attitude / culture; this change at Mozilla, if true, is a prime example. I don't need PulseAudio on any of my machines and having had experience of it I won't touch it with a bargepole. PA is just another layer of bloat which is unnecessary for the majority of users (yes, it solves a few problems for a few people - great, feel free to use it) but having the flexibility to choose the makeup of our systems has been a major feature of OSS and culture for as long as I've known it and this is what's slowly but perceptibly getting more restricted.
Posted Mar 11, 2017 13:29 UTC (Sat)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (6 responses)
PA fixes all of that. But don't worry. The majority of users don't care if their whole desktop deadlocks because of some incoming-IM beep, or they get deafened by an incoming phone call!
Posted Mar 11, 2017 19:49 UTC (Sat)
by ajmacleod (guest, #1729)
[Link] (5 responses)
Audio works absolutely flawlessly on my system, recording and playback, and I am very happy to keep yet another pointless layer of flaky, poorly performing (by design) bloat out of the equation by banishing PA.
As I said before - I don't deny that PA offers features that some people need (and I needed myself on some systems in the past - the networked audio aspect); most people have no need of it at all, any more than most people need JACK.
I'm happy that PA is an option - I just want it to stay that way, an option.
Posted Mar 11, 2017 22:32 UTC (Sat)
by foom (subscriber, #14868)
[Link]
Posted Mar 13, 2017 18:20 UTC (Mon)
by MattJD (subscriber, #91390)
[Link] (3 responses)
Out of curiosity, how is PA *designed* to be flaky or poorly performing? I can understand people believing it was *implemented* that way (let's avoid repeating that discussions here), but I haven't heard an argument about why it was designed that way.
Is it just an argument about PA being a userspace daemon vs doing the audio mixing in the kernel? Or is there something else?
Posted Mar 14, 2017 3:07 UTC (Tue)
by foom (subscriber, #14868)
[Link] (2 responses)
But it's really not like that. ALSA is confusingly the name both for low level kernel audio drivers, and some rather complex userspace library functionality, including sound mixing, samplerate conversion, multichannel remapping, and more. Effectively everything configurable it can do happens all in the alsa library, not the kernel.
Pulseaudio uses just the lower level kernel-alsa functionality and entirely replaces the higher level userspace-ALSA functionality (like mixing) with a new implementation. It provides a better API for apps, and also plugs in as the default sound output device in the high level alsa API, for compatibility with existing apps.
Posted Mar 14, 2017 17:35 UTC (Tue)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link] (1 responses)
For evidence of this from an app developer, the comments and commit messages in mpv's direct ALSA support are a great source.
Posted Apr 6, 2017 11:47 UTC (Thu)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
Posted Mar 11, 2017 14:44 UTC (Sat)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
Unless of course you had a system that couldn't run WinXP, due to inadequate resources (XP was considerably more demanding than 98 or ME) or lack of hardware support (2K/XP had very different driver models, and a lot of hardware never received drivers. (This was the golden era of "Linux supports your hardware better than Windows does")
> It's not just a natural resistance to change, it's deeper
No, it's absolutely a resistance to change. Nobody wants *anything* to change, ever. Except when they want something specific to change. And then they want it exactly the same, only different.
I learned this lesson twenty years ago, and it's a very large part of why I avoid UI and web-work like the plague.
Firefox 52.0
Firefox 52.0
PA is just another layer of bloat which is unnecessary for the majority of users
The majority of users (because the vast majority of machines sold) have Intel HDA-compatible (on-motherboard) sound. The vast majority of Intel HDA implementations cannot do hardware mixing, and if you try all but the first player will block until the sound device is released and you kill -9 it. Almost no players release the sound card unless you e.g. stop playback (not just pause it) and with a ramifying set of blocking processes like this it is very easy to be playing a fullscreen game and then the whole system appears to deadlock because the game has the sound card and something else has blocked on it and now the game is blocked waiting for some resource (often X-related) that the blocked app needs. Now you have to reboot, unless you have a second networked machine you can ssh in from and kill things. Oh and also because of the lack of proper cross-app volume control even if you *have* software mixing, the new thing playing its notification beep or whatever will probably be either inaudible or deafen you.
Firefox 52.0
Firefox 52.0
Firefox 52.0
Firefox 52.0
Firefox 52.0
Firefox 52.0
Firefox 52.0