As a Python programmer who learned Ruby to develop Rails applications, I have to agree. If you know some Perl and are happy with it, you will probably feel at home with a lot of Ruby's conventions. That being said, Ruby has some cool features language features that aren't in Perl or Python. (The code yielding stuff and passing code blocks, I'm thinking.)
If you don't like or know Perl and are happy with Python, it's probably not worth your time to learn Ruby unless there's some killer app you really want to play with (like Rails). To people like me with whom Perl never really clicked, certain conventions in Ruby might seem frustrating. (I'm looking at you, regex syntax! Instead of returning match values, let's put them in some arbitrarily named global variables! Yay!) They are both great languages, though, as long as you are willing to spend the time necessary to get to know them.
You're right. I didn't mean to imply that sound server fever was a Fedora problem. Ubuntu is definitely going down that path, too. I'm just trying to express how dumb I think it is to include a new sound server instead of fazing the technology out completely.
Anyone who has used ESD or Arts before can tell you that sound servers are worthless and cause many more problems than they solve. In general, sound servers do the following:
* Allow a select group of applications to share the sound card at the same time. * Deny normal applications from using the sound card if the select applications have made any noise in the last X seconds. * Deny the select group of applications from using the sound card if the normal applications have made any noise in the last X seconds. * Introduce a lag of at least 500ms - 1000ms to the sound card.
Now, I know that very special sound servers like Jack (which I use occasionally for musical composition and love) handle latency very well. But that's only with very fast hardware, a small number of streams, and special kernel patches and that's at the expense of every other process running. Jack has been around a long time, and while I think it's great for musicians, I'd be damned pissed if Fedora or Ubuntu decided to enable it by default and patch every application to use it.
And as for PulseAudio, I don't think we need a CPU sucking and latency producing sound incompatibility layer to screw up sound in 3rd party applications. The Linux vendors (Ubuntu and Fedora both) should be learning from the mistakes of the past. Sounds servers are unnecessary.
Seriously, what the hell are these Linux vendors thinking? It's not 1994, we don't need another laggy, buggy, soundcard hogging sound server! The first thing I do when installing a new distribution is make sure that both ESD and Arts will never run.
ALSA supports sound devices with hardware mixing and it supports transparent software mixing for devices without. All this stupid sound server will do is make it more difficult to get sound working properly with 3rd party applications. My favorite quote is from the Fedora Wiki regarding this topic (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePulseaudio):
I fear every single OSS-using package needs to patched to replace the actual binary by a shell script that runs the real binary through padsp.
That alone should send off alarm bells in the developers' heads. This is a BAD idea. At least the KDE devs have it right. They are dropping Arts from KDE 4. I hope it's only Gnome users that will have to deal with a braindead sound server.... again.
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As a Python programmer who learned Ruby to develop Rails applications, I have to agree. If you know some Perl and are happy with it, you will probably feel at home with a lot of Ruby's conventions. That being said, Ruby has some cool features language features that aren't in Perl or Python. (The code yielding stuff and passing code blocks, I'm thinking.)
If you don't like or know Perl and are happy with Python, it's probably not worth your time to learn Ruby unless there's some killer app you really want to play with (like Rails). To people like me with whom Perl never really clicked, certain conventions in Ruby might seem frustrating. (I'm looking at you, regex syntax! Instead of returning match values, let's put them in some arbitrarily named global variables! Yay!) They are both great languages, though, as long as you are willing to spend the time necessary to get to know them.
You're right. I didn't mean to imply that sound server fever was a Fedora problem. Ubuntu is definitely going down that path, too. I'm just trying to express how dumb I think it is to include a new sound server instead of fazing the technology out completely.
Anyone who has used ESD or Arts before can tell you that sound servers are worthless and cause many more problems than they solve. In general, sound servers do the following:
* Allow a select group of applications to share the sound card at the same time.
* Deny normal applications from using the sound card if the select applications have made any noise in the last X seconds.
* Deny the select group of applications from using the sound card if the normal applications have made any noise in the last X seconds.
* Introduce a lag of at least 500ms - 1000ms to the sound card.
Now, I know that very special sound servers like Jack (which I use occasionally for musical composition and love) handle latency very well. But that's only with very fast hardware, a small number of streams, and special kernel patches and that's at the expense of every other process running. Jack has been around a long time, and while I think it's great for musicians, I'd be damned pissed if Fedora or Ubuntu decided to enable it by default and patch every application to use it.
And as for PulseAudio, I don't think we need a CPU sucking and latency producing sound incompatibility layer to screw up sound in 3rd party applications. The Linux vendors (Ubuntu and Fedora both) should be learning from the mistakes of the past. Sounds servers are unnecessary.
Seriously, what the hell are these Linux vendors thinking? It's not 1994, we don't need another laggy, buggy, soundcard hogging sound server! The first thing I do when installing a new distribution is make sure that both ESD and Arts will never run.
ALSA supports sound devices with hardware mixing and it supports transparent software mixing for devices without. All this stupid sound server will do is make it more difficult to get sound working properly with 3rd party applications. My favorite quote is from the Fedora Wiki regarding this topic (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePulseaudio):
That alone should send off alarm bells in the developers' heads. This is a BAD idea. At least the KDE devs have it right. They are dropping Arts from KDE 4. I hope it's only Gnome users that will have to deal with a braindead sound server.... again.