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PulseAudio Creator Responds To Critics
Dan Jones writes "As recently discussed here, Linux sound development has come under fire for being overly complex and, more specifically, PulseAudio has been criticized for not being a 'good idea.' In a lengthy interview, PulseAudio creator Lennart Poettering has responded to the many critics of the new-generation sound server and says such complaints and criticisms about PulseAudio in some Internet forums are not really shared by the vast majority of technical people. While Poettering admits PulseAudio itself is not bug-free, he believes the majority of issues are being triggered by misbehaving drivers or applications."
Oh give me a break, what a crock!
First off, the whole damn thing was so FUBAR, reports from users surely aren't even needed at all! The slightest bit of rudimentary testing reveals obvious breakage in multiple serious ways! You are getting hung up on all the details nice users like me took the time to write in there, when in reality we should have all just reported "all of us think this thing sucks for totally obvious reasons, have you even tried it? Fix your broken shit.".
"I will ignore all other issues mentioned in comments here."
Second of all, if I want to communicate with the developer by submitting bug reports written on a fricken paper aeroplane, then that's my prerogative - 1 report, 10 reports, initial bug, in the comments, it doesn't matter. The bottom line is that users are communicating serious problems to the developer, and the developer is *ignoring* them, because he doesn't care for how they were submitted. And, yeah, sure, that's his prerogative too, but it doesn't change the fact that the software sucks, problems are being brought to his attention, and he's not acting on them.
Third, you can't expect users to file separate reports for separate issues if they aren't capable of discerning how many issues there are! I already spent an hour identifying and writing down all the problematic and erratic behaviour I was seeing - and I have no idea how many different bugs that actually is. He should be thankful for receiving carefully specified reports at all, and use his knowledge of the system to immediately identify how many bugs there are, and go file separate bug reports himself, rather than expecting me to somehow slog through figuring it all out. He's not being paid to write software for me, but I'm also not being paid to do QA for him.
he believes the majority of issues are being triggered by misbehaving drivers or applications
Linux is finally learning from Microsoft!
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Yes. Quite a bit of clue.
Do you have an arguments that you would like to make, or is your claim to fame here that you just want to insinuate that you have one?
"His name was James Damore."
I should...why? Pulseaudio works great here - no problems at all, no high CPU usage, nothing. It's funny that people will happily waste hours of their time getting rid of alsa while they critize pulseaudio for wasting their time with its problems...
It's clear to anyone that has looked into this that most people are very happy with Pulseaudio. All the important distros ship it, and the users that have problems are clearly a _minority_, which is only getting smaller and smaller with each new version of Pulseaudio, Alsa and the kernel. And the geeks that fear changes and love to bitch about are running out of excuses. Linux would have far more problems going back to OSS4 (hey, why I can't set per-app volume, why audio over bluetooth doesn't works as I want?).
Each time Linux redesigns some subsystem there are problems, and we see the same people bitching about how we should use $ALTERNATIVE instead and how Linux is not ready for the desktop. But with the time the problems dissapear and the linux desktop gets more and more solid.