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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."
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.
Yes, everything you said about Linux is true. The problem is that OS X also "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'." Oh, and also the sound just works out of the box.
Linux is going to have to get better if it's going to compete with OS X. Competing against Windows isn't that hard. Linux is basically at par with it in most areas. The real problem for Linux is that it has to be not just as good as Windows, but better than Windows and its other competitors. And right now, other competitor #1 is OS X, and OS X just 'stole' a Linux developer by being easier to set up sound cards.
Is it a little thing? Yes, and that's exactly the problem: In OS X, the little things, just work!
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