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Comment by jonathanyc | Hacker News Reader

>but you have an opinion about Systemd and Pulseaudio that I simply cannot fathom as authentic or fact based.

You criticize people for being unfriendly and then say you "simply cannot fathom" that their opinions are authentic?

How long have you been using Linux? PulseAudio was almost universally major pain point for many years until other people came along and fixed Poettering's work up enough to make it marginally better than ALSA. If you "simply cannot fathom" that the poster's opinions are authentic, you have been living under a rock.

I thought engineering and "science" was supposed to be a place for objectivity and fact-based reasoning, not pathos and let's-not-hurt-each-other's-feelings-with-criticism.

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> PulseAudio was almost universally major pain point for many years

The operative word here is was.

ALSA had a lot of problems for my use case, Pulseaudio just works. Most of this is probably more due to other contributors and just generally distributions getting their act together, but the world we live in today is undoubtedly better than it was before Pulseaudio.

What about the counterfactual where Pulseaudio was never started?

It is often said that the best way to get a correct answer to a question on the internet is not to ask the question, but to post a wrong answer. It seems to me that what Poettering is doing is the exact same thing applied to open source software, and I for one am grateful for it.

> It is often said that the best way to get a correct answer to a question on the internet is not to ask the question, but to post a wrong answer. It seems to me that what Poettering is doing is the exact same thing applied to open source software, and I for one am grateful for it.

That's an interesting way to look at it, and I think you're right. He's coming up with what he sees as a solution to something that, while it isn't broken, isn't great either (in the case of systemd, other init systems work but they all have shortcomings), only this time I think it backfired. Now the "wrong answer" as you put it, is being implemented by the major distros except Slackware and Gentoo, and I fear that it's gotten to the point that it can only be fixed by being surgically removed and replaced with something else, which may end up being even worse.

My personal solution is to stick with non-systemd distros, for others it's grimace and bear it, and for many it's not a problem in the first place.

> What about the counterfactual where Pulseaudio was never started?

Everyone would then be using JACK, and the world would be a better place for it.

Which Jack? Jack1 or Jack2? [1]

My experience with JACK seems very similar to everyone else's early experience with PulseAudio, really buggy, lots of audio pops (small buffers) or latency (big buffers).

One of my most technically adept friends has spent a long time trying to setup a basic debian install with JACK working reliably (done) only it's very fragile, upgrades to random packages broke it so often we now do our audio work without a general purpose computer in the hotpath.

[1] http://trac.jackaudio.org/wiki/Q_differenc_jack1_jack2

I personally like jack2 better.

If your friend is using Debian, may I suggest the kxstudio repos [1]? They make JACK (1 or 2) easy as pie to deal with. I personally use Arch nowadays, and breakage after upgrading hasn't been a concern for quite some time.

1. http://kxstudio.sourceforge.net

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