I don't understand all the negative reactions. Canonical is recognizing various problems in making GNU/Linux mainstream. They are then innovating at a deeper level (fixing root causes rather than duct-taping) to ultimately attempt to really attract the layman to a mobile or desktop GNU/Linux distro. Devs don't need to target Mir if they don't want to, Linux users can switch to another Debian if they don't like it, and the Layman discovers that Linux can possibly be just as shiny as Mac OS.
Can someone explain to me why this is all so horrible?
Are these people designing a better answer to Wayland because it's really better, or because it always looks easy when you don't intimately understand the problem space? I honestly don't know, but it's a question I'd like answered before I get excited.
I'd like to hope since Wayland has been in development hell for ~5 years now, that if the Mir people are doing their job, they are intimate with both X and Wayland, see where Wayland improved, and where it made mistakes, and fix those.
1) For the past two years or so the community has been led to believe Canonical would be adopting Wayland. After the slow build of anticipation over that, it was dropped out of the blue.
2) Simple distrust of Canonical's homemade projects after the Unity fiasco.
3) Fragmentation of effort to unseat X. The chance of repeating the history of every other display server that was going to "replace X within Y years" becomes that much higher with two competing alternatives marginalizing each other.
If this news had come three years ago I imagine the response would be wildly different.
1 ) I was also under that impression, but coming to think about it who created that expectation, the community or Canonical? I don't know.
2) Calling unity a fiasco, is like calling it a failure. Which I believe is simply not true.
Yes some people didn't like it and moved on or made their opinions heard on forums etc.
But Canonical has a plan with Unity, and at the end of the day it gives a better user experience to me and hopefully a lot of other Ubuntu users.
3) There is reasons to unseat X and there is reasons not to unseat X. But what to unseat it with lies with the people that have certain problems, and maybe the problems Ubuntu face with mir is differently to the problems wayland and its community face.
I personally would like to see two different tools, then one large tool like X, and if you read the article they explain why they decided on mir instead.
I did a quick google for "ubuntu having problems with wayland" and some interesting links got returned regarding developers struggling to get wayland working, so it didn't get dropped suddenly.
It seems that the mir spec is a public statement that after 2 years they are giving up for a alternative, with reasons and a alternative.
With some individuals up in arms with the discusion, but how should Ubuntu have handles it differently, while keeping to a deadline.
> Calling unity a fiasco, is like calling it a failure.
This has gotten singled out so I'd better say that I meant to find a more polite way of saying "shitstorm". It's not a judgement on Unity itself, but I think it's fair to call the reaction at the time a fiasco.
I still use Unity, for some reason, and I am shell-shocked it was allowed to be released.
I've never worried about window focus failing to work properly until Unity. I've never had terminal windows fail to be refreshed when scrolling text until Unity.
Personally I love it. I had planned on installing a tiling window manager, but after 10 minutes with Unity I decided to stick with it. It's the first Linux GUI I've found ok since Enlightenment 0.16, and the first time since I left the Amiga behind I've had an environment I'd say I'm happy with.
And most people I've heard who have used Unity love it. The only people I hear complaining are typically people who expect the Linux desktop to remain static and unchanging the way it was when they first used it.
Unity might be a fiasco with a small subset of old Linux users, but Unity or something like it will be essential for Canonical to keep attracting new users, who are expecting polish at the level of OS X rather than at the level of the Linux desktop of a decade ago.
>The only people I hear complaining are typically people who expect the Linux desktop to remain static and unchanging the way it was when they first used it.
Or who are stuck on older hardware (why was 2d retired, again?)...
Or who think it's utterly silly you have to write a INI (.desktop) file to put arbitrary links in the "dock"..
Or who think that the interface wastes a lot of space...
You've went and generalized a lot of people with legitimate complaints about that DE. Kind of like Ubuntu's developers do.
I despise Unity. I'm only using it right this minute because our company standard desktop at the $DAYJOB is Ubuntu.
Personally I find the state of desktop Linux to be fairly close to abysmal at the moment. I'm not sure we're any better off now than we were with Gnome circa 2000 or so.
I had, and still have, high hopes for KDE once Qt went LGPL, and I do run KDE on my personal laptop. It's not bad, but there are some major pieces of software that don't have Qt native versions. sigh
Regardless of the technical considerations, Linux and its surrounding ecosystem has a long history of many different companies co-operating on core software. Canonical's philosophy seems to fly directly against that - so far we have:
Launchpad / Upstart / Unity / Mir
Launchpad is free-software by name only, and Canonical actively discourage you to setup your own instance.
Upstart hasn't been widely adopted outside of Ubuntu, and has been replaced by the technically superior systemd.
Unity has been extremely unpopular from a user-experience point of view, and now we have Mir. So past history isn't filling me with confidence. Their philosophy seems to be "patch first, ask questions later".
I'm amazed how Canonical has the resources to keep branching out so much while producing a distribution every 6 months. I was under the impression they weren't yet making a profit.
Upstart is a bad example. pacman is a package manager only used by Arch Linux and nowhere else. Should Arch abandon it because it hasn't seen wide use yet? Better yet, there are plenty of package managers that are better than both aptitude and pacman (http://nixos.org/). Should we abandon the technically inferior solutions for the technically superior ones?
Unity is the same way: it is open source. If you don't like it, fork it and fix it. Or use one of the alternatives. This is not Windows or OS X. Vote with your feet and move over to Gnome 3, Xfce, LXDE, or another DE. If enough people do, Canonical will see the effects and stop putting effort into Unity.
IMHO, Linux and its surrounding ecosystem has a long history of everyone trying to pull it into their own direction. Companies are often forced to cooperate when they don't have another choice, but if they did, they would push their own ideas of what the infrastructure should be on everyone else.
But I would personally much rather see pacman (and every other distro-locked package distribution format) dropped where everyone adopted debs or rpms.
What I would like the most, though, is that the most logically technically advanced and easy to use package manager win, and everyone just adopt that. I know that pacman makes building package builds insanely easy, compared to debs or rpms.
> Upstart is a bad example. pacman is a package manager only used by Arch Linux and nowhere else. Should Arch abandon it because it hasn't seen wide use yet? Better yet, there are plenty of package managers that are better than both aptitude and pacman (http://nixos.org/). Should we abandon the technically inferior solutions for the technically superior ones?
A couple of points:
- one example does not plenty make
- Nix has a really interesting technical design. However, it trades the ability to patch security holes across your entire system for the ability to install multiple packages side by side and have atomic upgrades.
More importantly (I was lying about the two points), the package manager is tied intimately to the guts of the distro, it's much less shocking than having Ubuntu implement Unity.
Now, we'll see what becomes of Mir. Whatever mindshare Upstart had went straight to systemd as soon as it came out. If Mir is primarily an expression of hubris, I expect it will follow Upstart in obscurity. If Canonical manage to convince enough developers in the community, they may get something going.
"better" is generally subjective. there's a reason why nixos, upstart, etc, don't catch on.
For pacman vs nix, well, pacman is extremely simple. Extremely reliable.
Nix has some design advantages, but that don't translate all that well in the practical world right now. Maybe in the future.
Upstart was used because it was better than traditional init, and was used by Fedora as well. Then again, Linux could have had a much better init system many years ago, but the GPL zealots wouldn't hear of having launchd, and its less restrictive license, be used.
To clarify, my comment was that even before relicensing, launchd was under a less restrictive license than the GPL -- the APSL allows for binary linking -- but had clauses that didn't allow people to GPL their code. By the time launchd was relicensed, ubuntu had already released upstart, and another init replacement so quickly would have alienated people.
I don't see the problem in wanting to keep the guts of the OS forced-free by license. If any of the deepest components of the Linux stack were MIT or BSD licensed, it wouldn't take long for some business to fork it into a proprietary blob they push for market adoption and you lose the freedom deep in the OS.
With something like init, I would have to disagree. The biggest problem with this decision is that they ended up with an inferior project that wasn't nearly as flexible as the open options. While there are certain areas where keeping things under a restrictive license like the GPL may be useful, the init system is one where I can't see of any way how a closed system would offer any sort of competitive advantage.
> Unity has been extremely unpopular from a user-experience point of view
Has it? Do you have numbers?
Because I see a small number of people who complain very loudly, and often make sweeping claims about how unpopular it is without any evidence, who always get followed by responses from people (like me) who love it...
upstart is used by the current release of RHEL, but it's true that Red Hat has signaled that systemd will come to RHEL as well (Fedora now comes with systemd as far as I know).
I don't see the problem with then using whatever they want, if it provides a good solution, when upstart was developed systemd wasn't even a viable alternative, for me it still is not if stability is what you want and run on a non-desktop system.
Exploring Android internals I much SurfaceFlinger than X in my understanding of its architecture.
> the Layman discovers that Linux can possibly be just as shiny as Mac OS.
Why do we want the layman to be using Linux? To give Valve more Linux customers or something?
We should let them be. Laymen will invariably be better served by Microsoft or Apple, trying to win them over in some sort of misguided drive to "win" market-share seems foolish. Linux should focus on it's niche, and Microsoft and Apple theirs.
This market-share envy makes no sense to me. Does Artic Cat stare with envy at Ford's userbase and expend effort trying to get suburban parents to drive their kids to school on snowmobiles? That would just be silly.
Practically: I want to be using a system that I can be confident has good hardware & software support, not always double checking everything I buy to make sure it will work. That means getting at least a few % market share so that other companies take it seriously.
There's also an ideological angle: many Linux users feel that there's something wrong with a world where only the technically adept can use a free, open source operating system.
> not always double checking everything I buy to make sure it will work.
I feel like we've been there since... 2007? My last several purchases were made with zero caution or research anyway, maybe I've just been getting lucky.
> many Linux users feel that there's something wrong with a world where only the technically adept can use a free, open source operating system.
That's fine and all, I don't buy into that ideology but it is fine if others do. Perhaps someone should warn these unsuspecting masses that "Linux for your technologically illiterate grandmother" advocates are not as pragmatic as they may claim to be. I feel like these people are dressing Linux up as something that it is not in order to sell it to people who, were it presented honestly, would not pay it a second glance.
The hardware situation has got much better, but there are still some problems. Laptops with both integrated and separate GPUs aren't very well supported (so I hear, I don't have one). There's a relatively new scanner in my office that's not supported by SANE. I wanted an external wifi adapter for a desktop recently, and I'm not sure how many will just work with Linux.
On the software side, Steam got ported recently, but there's plenty of other software that we'd like to see. Flash is no longer released for Linux, although for now at least I can still watch iPlayer with the last version of Flash that was released. Hopefully HTML5 will have killed it before much longer.
Of course we shouldn't pretend that Linux is something that it isn't. If it's not good enough, we aim to improve it. But I honestly think that, if non-technical users got something like Ubuntu 12.04 pre-installed on compatible hardware, it would work perfectly well... except for the expectation, both from users and app developers, that everyone has Windows. Which brings me back to the point about market share.
Even drivers that were previously mainline have broken. So while the Intel 4965 used to work fine on Linux, it no longer does. And that is for a driver in mainline.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Ubuntu's raison d'etre, which is to bring Free (libre) software to the world.
Except the rest of the (consumer) world doesn't value libre as a first-class feature. They want the shiny.
The way we get to bring our values to the world is to be commercially relevant. Because otherwise, hardware vendors don't care about you, ISVs ignore you, app developers target other platforms, and so forth.
Market share isn't the end goal. It's a means to the end.
"This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Ubuntu's raison d'etre, which is to bring Free (libre) software to the world."
Here's my marketing campaign, sad as it is, its the best possible spin:
"Hey world, I've got something new for you, its incompatible with everything and doesn't work with anything and can't actually do anything you want, but, hey, its new so it must be better and it does a bunch of stuff that nobody outside the dev community cares about. Oh and we "had" to take some stuff away like network transparency which is awesome, err, I mean ignore the man behind the curtain and someday VNC might work, oh and every dev who's finally gotten used to the existing weird design will have to retrain. Other than that trust me its awesome you better switch now. And by switch, I really mean it since it'll be incompatible with everything else ever written." How could anyone not drop their entire legacy installed base of hardware and software and training and switch, I mean its got transparent animated dancing robots which no one can do without, and its got electrolytes that plants crave!
I'm sorry I just can't do any better given bad news.
Seems dishonest and manipulative to me. Con a bunch of people into adopting something that doesn't really fit their needs, is just shiny, so that you can use them as leverage... that is not something I am interested in.
Meanwhile all of those unskilled users are not without a cost. Free software support infrastructure is not set up to handle that many unskilled users. If Canonical is going to be giving all of those people 3rd party support themselves, that is all well and good, but it seems to me they tend to punt the ball.
The entire reason why desktop Linux has been a failure is exactly because it does not fit the needs of most people. And for that audience, "shiny" is equally important as "featureful".
In the modern marketplace, you can't choose either/or. It has to be both.
Ubuntu wants to do both and additionally add libre.
The strawman fallacy you inferred from my statement has the additional fallacy of incorrect causality.
People are initially attracted to Ubuntu for a variety of reasons, and we hope to keep them because we are fit for purpose, not for whatever ideological reason or niche feature, and certainly not due to any sort of con job.
Desktop Ubuntu has failed to reach that critical mass of users to be taken seriously by industry (our good friends at Valve notwithstanding), and the only logical place to jumpstart the install base is the mobile world.
The mobile market is brutally competitive. Ubuntu will succeed or fail on its own merits, not because of any dishonest manipulation of innocent users.
Has desktop Linux been a failure? By what measure, adoption of people who are not in it's niche market? Would it stop being a "failure" if we got a bunch of laymen using it?
Compare community desktop linux distros with community distros of something more oriented towards the masses... say.. Android.
The Debian Project is a well oiled machine, coherent and consistent. Everything has a well defined process. Technically capable users don't have to sort through piles of crap to get work done.
Cyanogenmod on the other hand is an utter shitfest. Standard operating procedure there is wading through clusterfucked forums looking for undocumented unofficial fixes (in prebuild binaries mind, no source) in threads thousands of posts long filled with idiots saying "hurr durr, I dropped my phone in the toilet, now this patch doesn't work". They cannot handle the size of their technologically illiterate community, and everyone attempting to use their software, technical or otherwise, suffers as a result. (This isn't even touching the issue of shittier hardware support than you would ever expect to see with desktop linux...)
If piles of unwashed masses were really what desktop Linux is "missing", then community maintained Android distributions should, far from being a nightmare, be the promised land. This is plainly not the case.
Show me the desktop Linux equivalent of Android, not Cyanogenmod. It doesn't exist - and you can measure that failure with any number of metrics.
If Ubuntu can achieve that type of success and protect the freedom of users with the GPL (instead of the permissive BSD model for hardware makers) then we will have accomplished something in the world.
You have missed the point. Show me the Android equivalent of Debian.
Show me an Android project, with all of the unskilled users that come with it, that is anywhere near as organized as the Debian Project. Show me that legions of unskilled users have allowed this Android project to achieve hardware compatibility at all comparable to what Debian achieves on the desktop.
Such a project does not exist. I assert that it does not exist in no small part because they have too many unskilled users, and because hardware support does not materialize as soon as you reach some sort of "critical mass" of unskilled users.
Idiot users are toxic; anything that touches them rots. Only corporations that are prepared to completely disregard community involvement are capable of wielding an idiot userbases. Canonical is neither up to that task nor does it even appear to be pretending to be. Why? Probably because the lunatics run the asylum.
Why do we want the layman to be using Linux? To give Valve more Linux customers or something?
Idiot users are toxic; anything that touches them rots.
Wow. The level of arrogance and elitism on display here is breathtaking.
This is why Linux on the desktop is irrelevant. Not the fact that it's incompatible with most mainstream software, not the fact that it's low profile or the fact that most Linux desktops look and function like Windows' retarded younger brother – but because a tiny minority of the otherwise hugely welcoming community set themselves up as some sort of entitled priesthood and actively discourage 'idiot users' from getting involved.
New users, even idiot ones, are good. Yes, they bring problems and stupid questions. Everyone has to start somewhere. But more people involved means more investment and helps challenge entrenched assumptions about how things should work. Making things shinier and more accessible does not equal dumbing things down.
Why shouldn't everyone be able to use an approachable, thoughtfully designed system that 'just works' and yet shares our values of freedom, community and open source?
>but because a tiny minority of the otherwise hugely
>welcoming community set themselves up as some sort of
>entitled priesthood and actively discourage 'idiot users'
>from getting involved.
I've spoken to many people over the years and looked at why they use Windows rather than Linux. The reasons, in order from most common are:
1. Lack of the applications they need; nearly always Outlook and Excel
2. Familiarity with Windows that they feel they've invested a lot of time in
3. Simply didn't realise there even was an alternative
Out of all the people I've talked to, there have been a grand total of ZERO that have ever given "Had a bad experience with a member of the Linux community" as a reason. None. Ever.
So, I'm more than a little dubious about your claim that this is in fact the main reason. Got any figures to back up that little theory of yours?
> Making things shinier and more accessible does not equal dumbing things down.
Except in practice, it almost always seems to. Which is why I don't and can't do any significant development, or work of nearly any kind for that matter, on Android, or an iPad.
> Which is why I don't and can't do any significant development, or work of nearly any kind for that matter, on Android, or an iPad.
That's about picking the right tool for the job, not dumbing down.
It's like complaining that a trowel is a dumbed down shovelling device because it can't make any significant headway with digging a massive trench.
That said, I develop Drupal sites locally on my jailbroken iPad and it's pretty nifty to have access to a full development environment on something that portable.
Arrogance or not, the fact remains that community developed Android distributions have all the unskilled users Ubuntu could ever dream of having, yet the projects are even worse.
Projects that rely on community support simply cannot handle the load. It is a failing of community driven open source to be sure, it would be great if it were otherwise, but I simply see absolutely no reason to think it is not reality. Your theory is nice, and it would be nice if it were reality, but it does not fit the data.
Show me the desktop Linux equivalent of Android, not Cyanogenmod. It doesn't exist - and you can measure that failure with any number of metrics.
Sounds like what you're really saying is "you can come up with any metrics you want, then define that as failure to justify my position". There's really no objective basis for saying "desktop Linux is a failure", especially when there's no objective standard by which we could say "desktop Linux is a success" either.
Like somebody else just said "market share? Who cares?" Market share is a means to an end, not it's own end. Desktop Linux works reasonably well for a certain population of people with a certain set of values. Does anybody expect that desktop Linux should gain Microsoft Windows like ubiquity?
It's an incredibly useful tool, with a lot of very smart engineers contributing awesome stuff to it. It's a development platform second to none and far more capable than any other OS I know of.
I don't think it's conning them into something they don't need. I think it's giving them what they want (shiny, easy to use) so that they have something that they need but don't realize it yet (libre).
I agree. But then the great thing about Linux is we don't have to use the layman distribution.
If someone wants to put the time and effort into making something that is great for my grandparents but awful for me then more power to them.
Meanwhile the rest of us can stick to the distros that are suited to our needs. I think this state of affairs is much better than any one operating system ruling. So long as we have binary compatibility among the Linuxen then I'm happy.
Who are we? I only see a Company and a Foundation geared to serve a platform namely Ubuntu and not Linux.
Yes Ubuntu is based on a FOSS ecosystem but it does not mean it shares the same goals as linux, whatever the goals of linux are.
It means its backed by a company which in my eyes want to bring the wonders of a second unix based operating to the laymen. Only in this one everything is open, and that for me makes sense.
It could help make the software market more competitive.
We can already see that Apple and MS want a lot of power over their platforms to the point of being able to decide what software will run.
A more neutral platform in wide use could make the playing field more level thus leading to better software in the long run.
Wait until the only way to run FF / Chrome / 3-d accelerated video driver / vi / emacs / something else thats "critical" is to switch to Mir. After all its free, all you have to do is abandon everything else. What could go wrong?
Simply don't use it is like telling people to take up a new hobby once theirs has been destroyed. But I don't want to take up a new hobby and I like this one. Sorry, no, someone else has decided to destroy it, so don't complain or try to work around the damage just select a new hobby. Hey, you look like a technical type of person, sorry about the death of free software and all that, but I bet you'd like Ham Radio or maybe advanced model railroading? ...
If a free software program decided to stop supporting X and Wayland, it would be because no one cared enough to contribute the code for continued support, which would imply that very few people were still choosing to use X or Wayland over Mir. If Mir really ends up being that wonderful, why shouldn't it win?
How does one free software program replacing another constitute the death of free software?
vi or emacs? Not going to happen, these are among the most portable software that exists.
About Chrome or FF that's only depends on the developers who use the product, I doubt that Google will ever target Mir, actually I believe that the GTK+ backend could target Mir and then boom, all GTK+ applications will then run on Mir, including Chrome. If Google ever comes to target a system with their browser this will probably be Chrome OS.
Firefox is another beast, but unless there's a decision to abandon Linux altogether there'll be devs working on it, or on iceweasel, it's Debian cousin, and this will probably run/compile in every Linux (and BSDs?) out there.
About 3D this is a shit area, I believe this move signals that Canonical will try to sell ARM computers in the future, there's a know lack of free drivers for GPUs in the ARM world. To see what I mean you'll only have to search for the Raspberry Pi "open source" GPU drivers debacle to see how things are going. This is not a criticism of Broadcom who has it's trade secrets to protect, but there the situation is far from perfect and always will be.
If Linux idiots weren't senselessly married to terrible in-group traditions and the status quo, it wouldn't have taken 20 years (or Canonical) to replace the clusterfuck that is X.
I use Linux and I don't even use a graphical environment most of the time because all it does is slow me down. (When I do use one, it's Ratpoison.) The most effective Linux developers I know work similarly. I believe this is a large cause of us being "senselessly married to terrible in-group traditions and the status quo".
I don't know if you're calling all Linux users idiots or what, but I consider Linux idiots as the people who use Ubuntu and Unity and don't have any idea whats going on underneath. They obviously aren't going to be doing any replacing of X.
TD;LR Linux is not one thing. Various projects are not mutually exclusive
We have GNU/Linux with a huge array of applications all licensed in such a way as to allow forking and customisation.
We have different groups of users of desktop/laptops; sysadmins; developers; scientific users; people who use administered desktops at work (e.g. French police &c)
We have a smallish and very pushy company in the UK (Canonical) who want to build on GNU/Linux to produce an operating system (Ubuntu) that will work on TVs, phones, tablets, fridges &c. Their target audience won't be developing alternatives to X, and probably won't be writing bash scripts or anything. (That isn't to say that some their users won't be doing those things).
We have a much larger company in the US (Redhat) who provide a stable conservative desktop as a compliment to their commercially supported server OS (RHEL). They part fund a desktop system that has changed radically recently (Gnome).
There is a German based company that make an enterprise desktop OS and server OS and who contribute to the development of a different desktop environment (KDE)
We have a not-for-profit foundation type entity who push out a version of GNU/Linux that can run on a huge range of architectures (Debian)
There is this thing called 'upstream'. Small projects push out all kinds of applications including alternative desktop environments.
So Canonical does its thing, some of the stuff they do may get back into the mainstream GNU/Linux, some may not. Some hardware manufacturer may or may not take up the system. I may be able to dock my phone to a keyboard/mouse/monitor and write documents in LibreOffice and edit podcasts/photos in a couple of years or 5. (bring that on).
The others carry on as they do now. You may have to choose the graphics card more carefully in future but I hope not. I suspect workstation class computers with separate monitor/bases will get more expensive and specialised anyway, and I imagine someone will do a 'high end workstation-OS' just for them.
Care to elaborate? Your comment reads as a sentence-long "NO, YOU!" right now. What about Canonical is a problem, and who are they causing the problem for?
As a "Linux idiot" myself, I hear your disapproval of the parent post, but am curious to hear the details that support your opinion (I might be able to learn something from it).
pilgrim689: Why is everybody hating on Canonical for
ditching X11?
sneak: Because they're "Linux idiots" who love X11.
ihsw: They don't love X11, they just hate Canonical.
ihsw is saying that the change isn't getting negative reactions because of the change itself, but because it is being made by Canonical.
I thought everyone was hating on Canonical for ditching X because rather than support the fledgling standard replacement for X, Wayland, they once again (just like with systemd vs upstart, compiz vs mutter/kdm) go off and do their own thing.
And if it turns out like either of those, they end up with an inferior barely maintained product that gets pushed to the sidelines once they show it off on a showroom floor.
Skimming the article, Canonical has some legitimate criticisms of Wayland, and are working on something that doesn't have those problems. Yay, this would be good! Except that it's by Canonical, and as you said, "Canonical never delivers". (That wasn't a quote from you, it was an iteration of "OP (never) delivers")
What I said was that when Canonical does deliver, they let the delivery wither and die without support because they are spread like a teaspoon of mayo thin on their footlong distro sandwich. See: Upstart, Compiz, Software Center.
> It certainly improves certain details of the user experience, when it works correctly, also usually consuming more CPU than flash player
You make a sweeping statement which is not true for every system. Looking at what happens playing a Youtube music video, according to htop:
- pulseaudio is using between 0 and 1% CPU
- plugin-container (wrapping Flash) is at 3%
- firefox oscillates between 20 and 40%
Now, my understanding is that, at the time pulseaudio came out, it was using untested functionalities in audio drivers which, for many chipsets, did not actually work and progressively got fixed. There was the same problem with graphics drivers when KDE 4.0 was introduced. Maybe you're out of luck and actually have a defective driver?
I'm not sure I have a bad driver, the last two chipsets I used were Intel (and no weird audio devices), works fine with other sw. Latest distro tested: RHEL 6 and Fedora 16
For me, PA would stay around 5%, 10% sometimes, and even more depending on the task. Not to mention crashing every week (at a random moment)
I'm not sure if this could affect the CPU usage. I hear that you can play with the resample setting to lower it, but I haven't had to do that on a 5+ yo desktop.
Nonsense. Fedora is a fine desktop Linux... I run it on a woefully underpowered laptop which I use for development, and it is every bit as usable as, say, Ubuntu (which I use on my corporate laptop). In fact, I'd take my Fedora/KDE setup over this Ubuntu/Unity setup any day.
Am I the only person in the world who has never had anything but a pleasant experience with PulseAudio? The first time I noticed that I was using it, I had already been using it for a year...
No, you're not the only one. I'd been forewarned of the awfulness of pulse, but didn't even notice its installation until later, when I discovered all the useful things I could do with it: play music over the office Apple airplay thingy; use two sets of headphones simultaneously; send audio to another computer in the house. Without any typing, searching, or rebooting,
I remember OSS and Alsa, and I don't miss either. As far as I can see, it makes Linux audio work like any other computer in this millennium.
I haven't had any recent trouble with it. Back in the early days, it didn't always work well with SDL, but that was fixed years ago. I've been able to crash the daemon with stress tests, but it seems to restart automatically.
I can't understand all the dislike of PulseAudio either. It certainly has a nicer API than /dev/dsp.
My most recent attempt to use PulseAudio (as it came via Ubuntu) had the quirk of not activating the headphone jack when something was inserted. It dutifully turned off my speakers, but no sound was available elsewhere.
I previously had stock Debian on the machine, and everything was working fine. A half day's effort was put into toying with ALSA configs that Pulse was deferring to for whatever driver choices it made. Dozens of help articles or threads where everyone else in the world could proclaim "Thanks, that fixed it for me!" left me with less functionality than I started with.
The only thing Pulse has ever done right for me was was help to record some loopback audio on an otherwise-crippled sound card.
No, there are a decent chunk of users for whom it works fine. Maybe as many as 95%. But there's also a substantial number of users for whom it introduces major problems - which would be more forgiveable (at least to yours truly) if it provided any visible advantages over existing systems.
(After a few months of trying to make pulse work I left for FreeBSD, which works beautifully and avoids a lot of linux's change (seemingly) for the sake of change)
For me, PA crashes around once a week (and this is with the latest version I tried), or just plain stops working (like muting the sound, garbled sound, etc)
Not to mention the delay that happens while switching songs in mplayer for example. Use ALSA and song switch is instantaneous.
Once every two or three months, when I remember to apply updates.
> - What audio softwares you use the most
Only flash (youtube, primarily. Also youtube's html5 player probably, I haven't paid much attention to that) and mplayer. A few years ago, XMMS2. I used to use an XMMS2 client I wrote for music, now I just use some bash scripts and mplayer; I can't say I've noticed any delay while switching songs with mplayer or XMMS2.
When I play music from my laptop through my raspberry pi connected to my TV with pusleaudio, then I notice an audio delay. That is the only sore spot pulseaudio has ever presented me.
Very interesting. I thought some instability may be due to PA staying up for a long time, but apparently not.
About the delay, try this: mplayer *mp3 (in a directory with mp3 files, of course), then press >. There should be a significant delay in switching songs (like, 0.5s). Make sure mplayer shows it's using the [Pulse] driver
I agree with. The only problems I've ever had with it have turned out to either be problems with the actual hardware or problems with the clients, not problems with Pulse Itself.
I will admit having a lot of a hate for figuring out which audio 'profile' is which...
If you've got the plugs for 7.1 and a normal line in as well as possibly a digital one, they you've probably got 23 choices of profile for your built in audio device. Add in a GPU with HDMI and the NVIDIA driver and you probably get at least another 7+ choices all labeled Nvidia... I find I frequently have to guess multiple times whenever I hook up a TV via HDMI.
But it works quite well if you define works as works without adding on any usability riders.
No issue on a couple of machines. Running with a call to start-pulseaudio-x11 from my .xsession, works fine. I believe running it as a system daemon is not recommended, though.
Not this again... You could have complained about this years ago, but it makes no sense today. PulseAudio got fixed.
> user experience
you can set up PulseAudio for LAN audio streaming with padevchooser (GUI). Could you do this with ESD? Arts? Tell me about this audio streaming solution with super UX for Linux that you know...
Parent seems to have been experimenting this issue recently. Saying "PulseAudio got fixed" does not mean "it works perfectly for everybody" (see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=813407 ). Most people will care more about getting a sound system which works without crashing and not sucking up CPU before getting sound system with streaming. The fact that you and me have had a good experience with it does not mean other people are not having issues with it (just as their bad experience may not reflect the overall quality of the software).
That's a Fedora bug. It wouldn't be bleeding-edge (enough!) if it didn't crash. Running Fedora and complaining in a public forum about crashes (without saying the distribution name in the first place!) makes no sense to me.
"you can set up PulseAudio for LAN audio streaming with padevchooser (GUI)."
Yes, and? I understand this is a useful feature for some people, but I'm just interested in listening to music and PA does not me allow to do that without frequent crashes and bugs
I don't care about the features of a car if it stops working at random. And yes, this has happened on every distro I tried since PA started being bundled. Every single distro, every single machine I've had only a stable system with PA OFF
Bugs can be fixed. Pulse is newer than Alsa and more complex, you should expect bugs. If you don't have a problem with the implementation details of PA (software mixing, optional software equalizing, networked audio, stateful audio adaption to devices) then just report the bugs and make it better. Don't whine and try to fragment the Linux space any worse than it already is, especially with Mir's announcement.
The real question is why did you need something newer in the first place ? Are years of bugs, misconfigurations, random crashes worth the minimal improvement end-users will get in the end (when everything finally works for everyone) ?
Yes, pulseaudio has all sorts of awesome esoteric features. You can stream sound transparently from a linux box to a windows one. That's kind of useless if it brings down your computer.
Oh, didn't realize you were asking about the UI specifically. I believe you would just set an environment variable of where you wanted the sound to go.
The part I liked was that you would start ESD and everything just worked.
I conducted an experiment on my last laptop, having noticed PulseAudio taking up more CPU than my media player. I found, quite consistently, that disabling PA led to my media player using more CPU on its own than the sum of the media player and PA when both were running.
I agree with this, I have similar experiences with pulse. I also use the pulse equalizer, which is super easy to set up.
I like it. I think it does things right, and they can optimize it more over time. It is better than having a fast audio subsystem that just can't do what I want. Pulse is a kitchen sink that at least covers its bases.
Basically, Canonical appears not to be publically consulting with the other distros (e.g., RH, Gentoo, Arch) about their changes. If they were, and there was a general consensus of a plan, I would personally not be bothered at all. But they seem to be content to pursue unilateral forking of what Linux means, and IMO that's not ok.
Canonical is a business, I believe they do care for Linux because otherwise I don't see why they will be part of the Linux Foundation. But they are a business.
And like most businesses they need to make unilateral decisions. The only difference is that Canonical makes these decision public knowledge while it is trying to achieve a hectic roadmap, for business purposes.
Ubuntu has been a Canonical project that is based on Linux for so many years. It is hardly community driven OS that people believe. I think it is a good thing. They are moving forward in some direction. They will make mistakes. Hopefully they will learn out of it. There is nothing wrong in it. In general Linux userspace is very fragmented. Organizations and developers seldom agree on anything. Ubuntu can't provide a true desktop user experience in such a space. And there are always distributions like Arch Linux which offer true freedom and completely stick to Linux specs.
The Layman doesn't want a desktop at all; they want a smartphone or a tablet. Want to drive mass adoption of Linux? Write a killer app for Android.
The folks who do want desktops, want those desktops to run software like MS Office or Adobe CS. If Linux can't do that, it does not matter how shiny it is.
You are sacrificing your objectivity, there is no reason other distros cannot be 'just as shiny' as Ubuntu or Mac OS.
Furthermore it is horrible because Canonical has a history of secrecy and authoritarianism and they absolutely go against the spirit of open source software development.
If the "spirit of open-source software development" can't stand for distro maintainers to have strong control over what goes in their own distros, this open-source spirit sounds pretty authoritarian itself. If (for example) I want to maintain my own window manager for my distro and I provide the source under a free license but don't accept outside contributions into my own distribution, what is wrong with that? Isn't that part of the freedom of free software?
In my experience distros attempting to keep things as close as possible to packages upstream (except for bug fixes) are always the most useable, stable, etc. So I sort of prefer the "authoritarianism" from upstream.
Additionally, an upstream package has authority only on ONE component. The distro has authority on ALL components. That makes ALL the difference.
I actually agree. I like Debian better than Ubuntu because I feel like its packages are generally more reliable for my use. But that doesn't mean I would declare Ubuntu to be "horrible" — just not to my taste. I respect Ubuntu's ambition and hope they are successful in what they are trying to accomplish.
especially since people have been slamming canonical for years for being mere repackagers who were not contributing any significant code to the ecosystem.
