Comment by hamandcheese
4 days ago
> > We’ve reached a point where an update to macOS — or to any app I rely on, really — is a source of dread rather than excitement. I now expect the new version to be worse.
You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS.
Proprietary software isn't built for users anymore. But (some) FOSS still is.
> You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS.
speak for your clearly non-pulseaudio-using self (:
Pulseaudio has been painless for like a decade and a half. Yes, it has a rough start and was probably made default in many distros before it ought to, but it's fine.
Pulse audio is ok until you plug or unplug things like earpieces and bluetooth speakers and then you want to do a videocall and random devices are the active ones. And then you find no obvious way to be able to record both input and output...
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Use pipewire and its pulseaudio facade.
Last I tried that (because everyone claimed it was magically better at everything) sound just randomly broke (I had no idea why, debugging pipewire is a nightmare), and since I switched back to pulseaudio everything just works again (and seems to use less CPU, but that could be selective memory).
Maybe I'm just old and grumpy, but we spent decades hammering out all the incorrect (for pulseaudio) assumptions in every layer of the stack and papered over impedance mismatches, and then people decide to rewrite from scratch again (though I'll admit I was a vocal pro-dmix anti-pulseaudio hater for a long time).
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Good thing that Debian pushed that thing into "non-core compatibility tools" status. It and NVidia drivers were always the things that made upgrading risky.
Relatedly, systemd stopped breaking a while ago. Either distros stopped keeping it up-to-date or people can learn.
And also clearly not a GNOME user...
It's no coincidence that PulseAudio and Gnome are Pottering-authored/Pottering-adjacent software.
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Or a KDE user...
For some reason they just can't help themselves from "improving" the themes that people are already using instead of creating new ones that people can choose if they want extra white space or whatever is hip now.
pulse audio's pain points were in setup for me, and in setup alone. using it has been a breeze.
an update last year broke some laptop microphone settings that in 30 years of using linux I had had no reason to even know existed. took me literally a couple of weeks to figure out what was going on and fix it. it was admittedly the first time in many years that it broke anything, but when it did it did so in style.
I felt like I got slapped in the face when I updated Audacity to see a goddamn cloud login service for the audio equivalent of Notepad.
Tenacity was developed because of that one Tantacrul video where he accidentally revealed that Audacity was going to start telemetry. Audacity tried to claim it was just basic stuff like OS version and hardware, then realized that people were still angry and decided to just push as far as they could. That video was like their turning point. The fact that even Audacity could fall to that showed a lot of people that even the basic stuff nobody ever thinks about can turn into something imposing and hostile.
> You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS.
As someone who's been burnt several times with CachyOS (Arch) updates, I don't think this is true.
Arch is bleeding edge. Breakage is expected there. It breaks so others can be stable.
Thank you for your service.
So many Linux user problems are self inflicted. It’s almost a demonstration why proprietary platforms limit your options so much when users choose to shove a stick in their bike spokes and complain it let them do that.
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Arch is not "bleeding edge" . It's latest stable version of packages/software.
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Using Cachy since about two years now. Never had any stress with it. Maybe it's about the random combination of components, hardware, driver/firmware quality? If you've got a bad combo, it will always crap out at some point in time. But so do others, too. Just on different combinations.
Arch users are basically beta testers. Near same day updates with upstream.
Exactly, though it's mostly community software and not corporate backed oss. Zig has been taking an interesting direction, emacs is still getting features after 50 years, ladybird is turing out nice, and a ton of other things
Richard Stallman was right all along.
Ubuntu is still annoying with it's daily popups asking to update the system and then most times requiring a system restart. In some ways it is worse than Windows.
Software & Updates->Updates->Automatically Check for updates:{Daily,Every two days,Weekly,Every Two Weeks,Never} and Security Updates{Display Immediately,Download Automatically,Download and install automatically}
There are even more options you can select.
If you want Ubuntu without the annoying, that's Debian.
I will probably be installing that on my servers soon. Luckily I don't need to use it as a desktop machine any more.
Updating glibc is a huge pain.
Using a new version of gcc or clang can cause a lot of problems. I try to avoid updating those.
It has to be a pain, everything depends on them (or rather, should, you still have holdouts like go fucking up things like NSS, holding back posix_spawn etc.).
In their defense the people working on glibc and gcc are pretty intelligent and spend a lot of time thinking about how everything they do affects their users, though they make mistakes like all humans (and LLMs I should say by now).
I've had plenty of issues with old bundled GCC compilers which were fixed in later versions. I'm feeling this is a psychological thing, not necessarily software related. (Doesn't invalidate the feeling though)