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Linux's Achilles Heel Apparently Revealed
ahab_2001 writes "In Information Week's latest 'Langa Letter', Fred Langa points to something that he calls Linux's 'Achilles' heel': 'New Linux distros still fail a task that Windows 95 -- yes, 95! -- easily handles, namely working with mainstream sound cards.' After lamenting his difficulties in getting a particular sound card to work with nine Linux distros, he concludes that his experience 'empirically shows that, despite its many good points, Linux still has some huge, gaping holes--holes that Windows plugged almost a decade ago.' (Oddball note: Information Week prefaced the e-mail alert pointing to this article by saying 'Occasionally, we have news or analysis of such importance that it warrants a special alert to you.' Hmm...)"
I've had problems with video card, SCSI cards, RAID cards, Fibre Channel cards, PCI cow milking cards, but never, not once, have I had trouble getting a mainstream sound card to work under Linux.
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
I've never had problems with my sound cards in recent years. I am not a big audio afficionado - a basic 2.1 speaker setup plugged in to the motherboard's onboard sound chip is all I need, so I don't really know. The extent of my experience is that the intel8x0 ALSA driver seems to work okay. Has anyone had bad experiences with modern cards and ALSA?
Fred Langa's main claim to fame was as one of the key personalities in CMP's now-defunct Windows Magazine. Therefore, he's much more familiar with Windows than Linux. Let's face it, he's paid to be a pundit that writes stories that sell magazines.
Although, this doesn't exactly invalidate his point. Microsoft's got a deep driver library database included in Windows XP... containing many cards that there is no known Linux drivers for.
Winders does devices well because that's where the market's been. Linux would smoke Winders boxes in all tests if it had better drivers.
You have the cause and effect backward. Windows has drivers because it's popular. Popularity came first, vendors bending over backward to help Windows work with their products came as a result. The technical framework for third-party drivers is there for Linux. But it's not being used by most vendors.
You *are* aware that Microsoft doesn't write the drivers for most devices that work with Windows, right? It's the hardware manufacturer that makes the devcice that does that work.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
And it isn't for lack of trying either. I've tried several dists, I've patched the 2.4 kernel with ALSA, I've built the 2.6.5 kernel but NOTHING works. ALSA sees the card, but it is muted even if you run the mixer and unmute everything and stick on the max. Yes, I have the speakers plugged into the right connection and yes I'm certain I've double and triple checked everything. It still doesn't work. I'm not alone in this - the internet is filled with people in the same boat as me.
At least 2.6.x comes with ALSA out of the box which is a blessing. But even so, if it takes major kernel surgery (and in my case it still doesn't work) there is something seriously screwed with the model.
On Windows or OS X, at most you stick a disk into the machine or click an exe. That's assuming it doesn't just work automatically. On Linux you could waste a day applying patches and rebuilding to do the same.
Linux really, really needs to sort out the whole driver issue because it throws a wet blanket over widespread adoption. Expecting people to rebuild kernels, or be in possession of a toolchain to build a module is unacceptable.
A single unified ABI for drivers would be a good start. I can understand if Linus doesn't care to support such a thing, but I can't fathom why the dist vendors wouldn't.
Yes, if Linux is going to be the OS for newbies. Yes, if Linux is going to be the OS for the desktop. The users won't care *why* it doesn't work, just *that* it doesn't work.
I call bullshit. At work, I routinely have to install win2k on older machines, some of these drivers are damned near impossible to track down, even when you know the manufacturer of the device. ...and don't even get me started on older Sony Vaios; they've got all sorts of custom hardware and Sony doesn't bother writing drivers for any OS other than the one they shipped with.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Unless you're looking to do pro audio. Then you'd want a Mac-compatible card from CreamWare, Alesis, Digidesign, Event, Lucid, Ensoniq, Opcode, Lexicon, RME, Lucid, Sonorus, Echo, or M-Audio, among others.
What, did you think that all those Macs in recording studios were using the built-in audio to run ProTools?
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
my first tech job (1996) was fixing windows computers with problems, most dealing with the soundcard.
i spent HUNDREDS of hours searching for drivers and changing default settings trying to get soundcards (from turtle beach to via to sound blaster compatible...) working in windows 95. as another poster said, it's not because of windows that these worked (or didn't work) it's because the drivers were well designed (or sucked ass).
it's the manufacturers fault for not providing linux drivers. but we have to remedy the situation by picking up their slack.
that said, i've configured around 8 computers with linux. i never checked the HCL first. and i got the sound to work (even on board sound) to work every time. maybe i'm just lucky but it seems that if you know what you are doing you'll get it to work. i didn't say it's easy.
fear is the mind killer
What he didn't reveal clearly enough is that the damn card does NOT work in Windows 95 or 98 as he claims it does. It only does so through a virtual machine that provides an emulated hardware layer.
His point is thus moot and shown for what it really is: FUD. Big, stinking, FUD of the worst kind.
Couple this with the fact that he does not give out the chipset model of the built-in sound card and I do not believe a word he wrote and neither should you.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software