Comment by skyyler
7 days ago
"everything about systemd sucks" people generally don't understand the problems that systemd is attempting to remediate, in my experience. Just repeating dogma that they heard someone they consider cool say.
7 days ago
"everything about systemd sucks" people generally don't understand the problems that systemd is attempting to remediate, in my experience. Just repeating dogma that they heard someone they consider cool say.
Or perhaps, we don't have the problems that systemd is trying to solve. Or systemd creates new problems that we didn't need or want. Kind of like pulseaudio.
Yeah pulseaudio was like "you need this so you can have two apps playing music at the same time" entirely ignoring the existence of sound cards with mixers or the alsa soft mixer. Similarly, systemd was hyped at the time for, among others, allowing parallel service start entirely ignoring the several init systems that were already managing parallel start quite happily.
This turned out to be entirely the right approach, though, and it was probably pretty obvious even at the time. Sound Cards with built in mixers have all but died out. Everything they did has been eaten by software,
Even at the time, few games used an API where they managed multiple channels directly; Software mixing was commonplace from the 90s. Any game that wanted to play battle sounds was not relying on the mere 6-8 channels that cards from that time could handle.
Our modern Pipewire based workflow is remarkably simple and remarkably effective, and it's significantly an evolution of PA.
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I do. systemd solves a lot of my problems, actually. Of course all of systemd could be cobbled together by combining a dozen or so independent projects, but that mess is exactly why normal people (even normal computer people) shy away from Linux.
And I don't recall a lot of software working well when Pulse isn't available, so I don't know why people still bring it up. Perhaps it's because I wasn't there at the time, but I've only seen ALSA as "that audio system you use when you have nothing else available". I still need the PulseAudio-wrapper for Pipewire to be useful for my systems, so clearly the Linux world has moved to Pulse-first.