It is my opinion that Lennart Poettering is the software equivalent of Thomas Midgley Jr., the inventor of both leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons.[1]
This is the person behind PulseAudio, Avahi, and systemd. In any sane world, these software projects would have been stillborn. Sensible alternatives would have outcompeted them. Instead, Red Hat did their best to foist them upon the community. They promised that after the initial adoption, all the wrinkles would be ironed out. All three times this was not true.
I hate to appear so cynical, and I'm certain that Red Hat didn't intentionally pursue this strategy, but it sure is convenient for them that the harder Linux is to use, the more they can sell support contracts. Not so convenient for people who actually want to use Linux.
> It is my opinion that Lennart Poettering is the software equivalent of Thomas Midgley Jr., the inventor of both leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons.
Considering that Midgley Jr. is (indirectly) responsible for the suffering and potentially death of many humans and other beings, I submit that this (in spirit) triggers Godwin's Law. The debate is therefore over.
> Considering that Midgley Jr. is (indirectly) responsible for the suffering and potentially death of many humans and other beings
Poettering is directly responsible for the suffering of many human beings, as indicated by threads like this. It'd be difficult and unfair to accuse him of being even indirectly responsible for anyone's death, though.
>Sensible alternatives would have outcompeted them.
Of course, and they didn't, because there were no sensible alternatives on linux. All these projects were clones of decently engineered macos projects, before they were created, linux people used some truly silly staff like sysvinit.
I would use something better than pulse and systemd, but there is nothing better available.
They manage better performance in real world use cases with a fraction of the manpower invested in them. I wonder what will happen to the suite of projects supported by redhat now that they are owned by IBM however.
Jack as a regular sound daemon? are you joking? Have you tried to run jack with several audio sources and audio outputs (including bt headset) without pre-configuration? It's not a pulse alternative, it's a low-latency daemon for professional stuff. Consumer oriented daemon should just work.
>runit
Does it do anything beyond service managing? Login, timers, bootloader, containers, logging facilities?
>runit starts /etc/runit/1
Wait, does it simply run sh scripts? No, thank you.
Which alternative to PulseAudio, Avahi, and Systemd exists for Linux that provide the same features?
I'm not aware of any audio daemon that is as feature rich and flexible and PulseAudio. None of the alternatives fit the same general purpose use case that is expected in a modern desktop that needs to compete with Mac OS and Windows 10.
If you use a modern Linux system with KDE, you can try removing PA. Odds are you won't notice that it is gone. Not saying that network audio is a bad feature per se, but in my ten years of using PA, I have never needed it. IMO, systemd and Avahi are fundamentally different from PA in that most users have no need for the latter but almost everyone for the former.
Because KDE has Phonon, an audio subsystem way more complex than PulseAudio (and in my experience, more bugged too).
Things like hotplug, Bluetooth devices and as such shouldn't be managed by your desktop manager, unless you want for things like hotplug and Bluetooth to only work in KDE.
Phonon is only an abstraction layer with API and ABI guarantees so every time a new technology comes and goes, all app developers wouldn't have to port their existing codebases.
Funny story:
During KDE 4.0 development, KDE introduced Solid library. Which abstracted HAL.
HAL was Linux'es "Hardware Abstraction Layer".
So HAL developers mocked KDE and got some tshirts that said "KDE Abstracted my abstraction layer".
1-2 years later HAL was deprecated. And Solid got a new upower/udev backend and no KDE developer had to port away their code from HAL to anything else.
Phonon's situation is similar. Xine, gstream, vlc, these technologies come and go. KDE apps don't care.
Also Phonon can get a QuickTime backend when it's built for Mac or something else for Windows.
You might be giving Lennart too much credit. As the author of the article points out, Lennart didn't invent PulseAudio and systemd so much as he ripped them off (poorly) from coreaudio and launchd. To compare him to any inventor seems too flattering.
Don't you still have to resort to shell scripts for anything slightly complicated (mounting a drive on a specific network connection) and just have systemd invoke them?
This is the person behind PulseAudio, Avahi, and systemd. In any sane world, these software projects would have been stillborn. Sensible alternatives would have outcompeted them. Instead, Red Hat did their best to foist them upon the community. They promised that after the initial adoption, all the wrinkles would be ironed out. All three times this was not true.
I hate to appear so cynical, and I'm certain that Red Hat didn't intentionally pursue this strategy, but it sure is convenient for them that the harder Linux is to use, the more they can sell support contracts. Not so convenient for people who actually want to use Linux.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.