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Jamie Zawinski Switches to Mac OS X
iskander writes "After a disappointing experience with sound, Jamie Zawinski has finally given up on desktop Linux and switched to Mac OS X. The future of apps like xscreensaver and Gronk is now ``highly ambiguous''. He has already ditched a free/open platform before, but he seems a lot angrier this time. Indeed, twisted by the Dark Side of the Source, young Zawinski has become."
jwz is responsible for many significant *NIX applications.
Certainly that's the case for a modern desktop operating system.
To be honest, I'm still waiting for a feature from BeOS to hit the "modern desktop operating system" scene: volume bars in the mixer for each different program that's using sound. So if I want to listen to music and play a game with obnoxious sound that can't be disabled (this happens with Java and Flash games mostly), I don't have to listen to the obnoxious sound.
I could probably create a user account, not put it in the "sound" group, and run all such games under that user, and it wouldn't have permission to access the sound device...
Some of the same reasons that I'm switching away from Linux to OSX. Don't have the time to fight those battles anymore. *Don't* want to fight those battles anymore
Slashdot used to be a OS advocacy site for Linux. Now, Slashdot is an OS advocacy site for Apple. Of course you should care.
How this qualifies as an important piece of news, I don't know. I'm assuming it's a "comedy" piece because he said "Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys." on one of the linked pages.
However, I myself have had problems with sound in linux, yes, but considering that (as someone who had only ever played about with TCP/IP in Linux and had never touched X or the Linux desktop until a few months ago) I have now switched from Windows to a Linux desktop and got sound working in all apps installed within a few days of switching. That was about four months ago and I still don't use Windows.
I had worked out everything he had worked out in less than two days of having a linux desktop. There are things that should be simpler (cups, sound, etc.) but none of them hindered me for very long and, once properly set up, work much better than my previous OS's incarnations. Yes, it's a pain having to "set things up", but it's hardly worth such a strop.
We all know arts, esd, etc. are a pain in the ass and, yes, we are all waiting for ALSA to "just work". Now that it's in the kernel, we finally have a standardised, working, maintained sound system that supports mixing on EVERY LINUX MACHINE. This should be the turning point.
If a program that plays sound doesn't have an ALSA-compatible option by now, it's not being maintained properly. If it does, it will just work with ALSA and any plugins you might use, e.g. dmix.
As soon as 2.6 distros become the standard, we can work on getting EVERY app to use the same damn sound systems.
I saw his entry on wikipedia and if he's such a great programmer who has made contributions to such important projects as, gosh, XScreensaver, it makes me wonder why the hell he:
a) didn't know this already (not a single XScreensaver that uses sound?).
b) can't work it out for himself.
c) throws a major strop because it's not point-and-click.
It occurs that he's just missed the point. You don't have a Linux desktop to say "I've got a Linux desktop". You don't have one to beat every other desktop into the ground with your technical superiority (real or percieved). You don't have one to complain that it's not like Windows. You don't have one to play iTunes (as he seems to value this as an important feature).
My desktop is Linux because it works, it's fast enough, it does what I want, it doesn't restrict me in any way, it's free, it's Free, it doesn't blue-screen, crash, corrupt and die every few months/years, I can leave it running overnight and not worry about if it'll crash before it finishes it's downloads, I can access it remotely (a good thing when you're working behind restrictive child-safe proxies all the time), and I can do things without wizards, dogs and paperclips jumping up to "help me find a file".
I can't help feeling that any decent programmer would have been able to overcome the same little roadhumps on the way without so much as a sigh. They might even have bothered to fix the troublesome programs themselves.
Just because it works for you doesn't mean it works for everybody and that is exactly the problem. Linux developers get things working just well enough, that if you have the right hardware, and the right amount of tinkering things will work for you. Hell, you may even be one of the lucky few who have the exact same setup as the original devs and don't have to tinker at all.
Unforutnately, for the rest of us, I have better things to do with my time that mess around with asoundrc files. All I want is for every freakin program to properly output over my SPDIF channel. Is that really too much to ask for? Apparently it is, and I've almost switched back to windows on numerous occasions because of this.
In fact, the ONLY thing keeping me on Linux right now is MythTV. If it wasn't for MythTV, all my servers would probably be OSX by now and my Media box would be Windows.
Bryan
There are tons of solutions to the problem, but they all miss the boat because they're done at the wrong level, and hence they're not transparent. The last thing we need are more sound demons. (I use NAS and it works fine, but it's the wrong solution too.)
All sound drivers without exception should work like they do currently on FIRST OPEN, but on second and subsequent opens they should automatically hook in a mixer and mix all inputs together.
The code to do it already exists, but it's just not being structured sensibly as above. It's no surprise that newbies find the one-at-a-time behaviour unhelpful, because it is. This is a multi-user O/S fer crissakes, single-open in sound drivers is just dumb!
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra