So what you're telling me is that the majority of us who only have a set of stereo headphones with a boom mic attached to a 48khz soundcard to listen to MP3s and participate in teleconferences, are gonna be forced to absorb stupid and innefficient (usually buggy if you use poetterisms as an example) abstrations that complicate our lives just so the niche sound processing subculture can have their cake and the devs can pad their resumes with FOSS activities.
Well said. And the niche processing subculture has had JACK for decades, which solves all these problems. Well, I hear it does anyways. The rant
LibreQuest posted confirms this. So why is Linux onto a
third sound daemon?
I'm in the "I just need my headphones to work" camp. I installed Pipewire. Sound promptly stopped working. I uninstalled Pipewire. Sound started working again.
Yeah, yeah I'm probably doing something "wrong", and if I just spent a couple of hours going blind reading documentation and doing Google searches, I could probably get some whiz bang results. This kind of blame-the-victim excuse used to be one of Microsoft's favorite tricks, but it's now become common in the Linux world.
This might be Freebsd's greatest strength on the desktop. Sound just works for the 99% of us that just want to watch Youtube videos or whatever.
Why do port maintainers always have to enable each and every crap by default? Seriously.
I read somewhere that this is intentional to support most use cases out of the box. Basically if an option doesn't have any exclusionary effects (e.g., it precludes using something else) it is turned on by default. I believe it was bapt@ referring to Wayland in the ports mailing list, but I may be misremembering.
But if not, there's usually another option supported. That's why I turn EVERYTHING on when I compile ports... and then I shake my head at ppl who first complain about lack of sound on FreeBSD, then complain that GStreamer breaks everything, and then complain that ALSA sucks, and get political about it. Open Source software is about having options, and giving yourself options, rather than getting political about it... wow.
I take the exact opposite approach. I turn everything off, except what I absolutely need. This is because all software has bugs, and the more software you have installed, the more likely it is you'll run into some.
It was insane that
net/netatalk3 wanted to install Dbus on my headless server just because
net/avahi needs it for some desktop use case. Problem solved with
dns/mDNSResponder.