Hacker News Reader

Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

Call me old fashioned, but I would really like some "old new distro"

Put modern packages, but not "new" packages . No pulseaudio, packagekit, networkmanager. You don't need to worry about automounting usb for example

Get me the latest version of KDE 3

That would be very fast in any modern machine

View on HN

Honestly, most of these are necessary evils these days. New sound cards are cheaper than old ones, and don't support software mixing. Hence Pulseaudio. (Not to mention things like Bluetooth headsets, which don't appear as ALSA devices and instead are natively supported by Pulseaudio.)

NetworkManager is similar -- editing wpa_supplicant configurations is a nightmare. It works from the command-line now, so it's not like it's imposing anything on you anymore.

Hasn't software mixing been in ALSA for ages, with the dmix plugin? I don't think Pulseaudio is necessary for everything.

I do see the Networkmanager is a necessary evil, but why does it have to be so awful? It's great if it works, but if it doesn't then solving the problem is extremely hard because of the bloated, uncommunicative nature of the program.

Pulseaudio can abstract over multiple devices, allowing you to mute individual applications, move streams between physical pieces of hardware, and so on. Audio mixing in kernel-space is brittle and the wrong place for the code anyway. Doing it in userspace is more secure, more flexible, and generally a good design.

In theory, maybe. In practice, Pulseaudio is just horrible and gave me troubles I have never experienced with ALSA. I'm personally convinced it's one of the biggest mistakes made in the Linux world.

However, if we're going to put the sound server in userspace, which isn't a bad idea, the kernel side should be broken down. This would be an excellent time to deprecate ALSA!

Not if you care about minimizing audio delay, which greatly matters in certain use cases.

Nothing is more brittle than Pulseaudio in a modern linux distribution. Maybe the flash plugin, but still it uses less cpu than pulseaudio usually

Nowadays I only have to restart PA once a week. This is simply ridiculous.

ALSA software mixing never gave me a problem.

Yes, wpa_supplicant is a nightmare, this is one thing FreeBSD got right

I didn't need PA with any of the new sound cards, and the BT dongles don't "support" PA (some are certainly ALSA, but others may "get in" in another way), but what happens is that it makes it easier to use it with it

That being said, I don't care to use new hardware, unless it's something essencial like a video card, chipsets, etc

That being said, I don't care to use new hardware, unless it's something essencial like a video card, chipsets, etc.

Why upgrade your computer then? You don't need the newest version of an OS if you don't want to do anything that the old version didn't do.

cpu speed, disk space and things that break

I much prefer Wicd to NetworkManager, though.

Try Gentoo or Arch, you can build them whatever you like

Arch has a very good user community. It's worth search the Arch forums even if you're not using Arch. They should be commended for their approach to clear documentation.

Some other minimal distributions include:

Linux From Scratch:

TinyCore: Took over where DSL left off, with better philosophy.

Slitaz: good internationalisation, runs entirely from ram.

TomsRtBt: the most Linux on a single floppy

Puppy: Weird and non standard but oddly popular

DSL: Also very popular among a certain group, was dead for years but is just recently getting a new release

Obviously some of these are scarily odd: single user, everyone has root, etc etc.

Or, y'know, any *nix. Just do a minimal/base install and build up from there.

I think you (and me as well) want BSD. Now the problem with the popular BSDs is the package managers suck by comparison to most Linux distros.

The problem for me isn't the package manager, ports is great in FreeBSD.

The problem is FreeBSD doesn't keep up with modern hardware and you have to work very hard to get a laptop that works specifically with it.

Well, I'm using a BSD system right now (that 'feline' one). Too bad it's got something messed up, hopefully it will get better with the latest version.

I think you are implying that OSX is a BSD. Just because you have some BSD userland utilities doesn't make you a BSD. OSX has a totally different kernel than any BSD (mach).

It is based on FreeBSD

The Mach micro-kernel was originally a BSD kernel fork (iirc 4.2BSD, when dinosaurs roamed the earth). NeXT/Apple added various things like DriverKit and later IOKit to Mach. Apple also took the network stack from FreeBSD, which is traditionally rather modular (for high performance kernel code, anyway).

Together they make up the current XNU hybrid kernel. You can look at most of the sources at opensource.apple.com

There's certainly lots of FreeBSD in OSX, but it's not like OSX is just FreeBSD with a sugar coated Apple UI.

Here's your maintained KDE 3.5 fork: http://trinitydesktop.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com