There was a reason he got so much vitriol: he's a terrible and manipulative person who is using political methods to push an anti-POSIX agenda. He's a Weev-level troll for an audience too stupid to realize the damage he's doing. He over-exaggerates a joke on IRC into a perceived attempt/threat on his life, and uses that as a springboard to insult Linus Torvalds for doing far more benign things than he regularly commits, whilst playing the victim card to the fullest.
I'll join the author in thanking lennart. Thank you for holding the Linux ecosystem back by politically forcing your bad monolithic software on us. Thank you for showing that not only Microsoft can implement "embrace/extend/extinguish" to ruin Linux. Thank you for showing the world how to use an open source company like red hat to muscle your changes into other distributions. Thank you for reinventing JACK's wheel. Thank you for introducing a new paper cut for every one Mark Shuttleworth endeavored to fix. Thank you for saying that people that disagree with you must obviously "hate the disabled" because they don't agree with your decisions.
And most importantly, thank you for showing how gullible and vulnerable the open source movement is. Not even Microsoft hurt Linux as much as you have, and this is with SCO vs. IBM in mind.
The next time I see him, I plan on telling him this verbatim.
This is exactly the terrible part of the community the OP talks about. Lennart while not being perfect, as no human is, tries to improve the lives of ordinary linux users. Comparing him to a misogynistic nazi like weev is unfair, and you should know that.
You are forgetting this is free software, you are free not to use it, just as much as you are. If you don't like systemd or pulseaudio then don't put it on your system. Sure there is a cost associated with going down that road.
Your post deserves down votes, because there is nothing enlightened or constructive about it.
You don't even bother to discuss why JACK is better than pulse audio and for which usecase. Mark Shuttleworth is introducing more fragmentation and papercuts than Lennart ever could e.g. Wayland vs Mir or the entire reason SystemD even exists and we are not all using upstart.
Lennart's audio work led to audio on Linux systems just work for the average user.
I expect that SystemD will advance server maintenance as much if not more.
All in all you sound like a fan of the Opera who is upset because someone invented the Muscial. Irrational and silly.
I think you are rather confused, you judged Poettering guilty not me. You need to prove that he is, not I that he is not. Sure you not a prosecuting attorney but I would expect the same idea of innocent until proven guilty to apply in as well as out of court.
You are "free not to use" his work, you are not free to force others not to use his work. If anyone thinks Systemd is banana's and wants to use it in their system/distro then they are free to do so. You are not free to force them not to use it. You are free to try to convince them that it would be better if they don't and they are free to be convinced or not.
By the way JACK is for professional audio work, PulseAudio is for consumer audio. Different users, different needs, and yet neatly complementary and cooperative with PulseAudio deferring to JACK2 when its running.
One more thing: Pulseaudio allows me to record audio from all applications, not just the ones that were built specifically with dumping audio to a file in mind. Maybe this is possible in JACK, I don't know, I don't care: It worked for me in Pulseaudio and not in JACK, which means Pulseaudio is more practically useful.
Now insult my knowledge of Unix again, O person who didn't know what Busybox was until a few hours ago.
I agree with the OP and with jerven's reply. Just one question: What makes POSIX, and Unix in general, so sacred that an anti-POSIX agenda is inherently a terrible thing, worth being opposed with such vitriol? Unix is just one way of many to put together an operating system. If the major GNU/Linux developers, inspired by Mr. Poettering, want to try a different direction, they're entitled to do that.
It appears you may be new to this whole "Unix" thing. What made unices popular was their ubiquitousness. If you had a BSD machine on the same network as a Linux or SunOS machine, they can communicate using standard protocols. Further, the applications themselves were portable between POSIX implementations.
The Unix Way is to have small programs that do one thing extremely well; when an application (with the exception of emacs) starts emulating Zawinski's Law, they're usually broken up into smaller pieces. I do not want one app that handles cd, ls, pwd, rm, mv, etc. I suspect that if Poettering/Sievers released an app (let's call it "fileD") that did exactly that, the Unix community would gather the torches and pitchforks to go put an end to the nonsense.
Kinda like they're doing right now with systemd.
A Unix that does not implement or respect POSIX is not Unix. And if the major GNU/Linux developers wanted to try a different direction, they can. But they don't. The majority of developers want to keep Linux this way. two engineers from Red Hat want it this way, and politics are driving it's adoption rather than technical merit.
> Further, the applications themselves were portable between POSIX implementations.
It appears you may be new to this whole "Unix" thing. Application source portability was never absolute, not by a long shot, back when Sun and SGI and HP were still relevant to what Unix was. They all had value-add APIs, little different ways of doing things which were deliberately different from everyone else's to encourage lock-in. And even disregarding that, the BSD/SysV split was even stronger then than it is now, with heterodox APIs like STREAMS still in use.
Linux and the Open Source BSDs are still different, but the standards are better-followed and the auto-configuration tools are better.
> It appears you may be new to this whole "Unix" thing.
I understand that you're doing this out of malice, and are using "reflection" in order to make yourself feel superior, and to take me down a peg, but I do regret using that sentence in the GP. The rest of the post was completely accurate, and that sentence diminished it.
However, I'll have to disagree with the rest of your reply; The BSD/SysV split, while large, is fairly comparable to what's going on today with systemd. Poettering has made his contempt for *BSD very clear multiple times, and is actively trying to extinguish compatibility with it.
GNOME needs massive work to play nice with any BSD now, thanks to Lennart. Porting between SunOS/IRIX/HP-UX was far less work than GNOME now requires.
One binary or multiple binaries is a distraction. The issue is how they talk to each other.
There already exist a single binary of what you describe, Busybox.
The interesting thing is that you could probably mix busybox and the individual coreutils and nothing would break.
This because the way they talk to each other, in steams of text via standard out and standard in, is defined and fixed. They also use those very same interfaces to talk to third parties.
Thank you for this reply. I would probably argue that Busybox isn't really the unix way, but I'm tempted to adopt your viewpoint of fixed defined protocols to talk internally and externally as my stance going forward.
Sadly, systemd still fails in this regard, whereas Busybox is a much better citizen.
Academically I agree. But practically, Unix is a fractured mirror of mostly-similar OSs. Adding one more is what everybody always does. Even POSIX was supposed to be some unifying thing, but its fractured too.
Perhaps a contract from all alternative implementations to abandon their individual forks and work on the "one true POSIX" would solve this, so it doesn't go into XKCD land?
I think what I'm trying to ask is, has any successfully merged forked projects? What would be required to reconcile everyone's issues enough to make everyone work on one codebase?
Not sure anyone involved wants to. There was an effort marketed as "Unify Unix" or some such. Sun, Hp, somebody else were the founding partners. Much hoopla.
One the day they were supposed to be done, each founding partner announced their own branded, extended version of Unix that was better than the unified version. You know, so they could out-sell their competition.
> thank you for showing how gullible and vulnerable the open source movement is
This is such an important lesson. As people watch systemd/Poettering fall and everybody scrambles to pick up cleanup the mess, I hope this lesson is not lost.
PHK's "Operation Orchestra" talk, where he tries to explain this problem of over-trusting and gullibility even more relevant with regards to systemd than it is to the NSA.
This sounds like a support issue. When did you install JACK? Are you having configuration issues?
You might need a GUI to make your configuration easier. Download Cadence from http://kxstudio.sourceforge.net's repository (or from AUR) and let me know if you still have problems.
But the thing is - if you have configuration issues with JACK and not with PulseAudio, doesn't that rather suggest that one is more useful? Especially when you're suggesting downloading extra software -just to configure something-.
If you're having jack configuration options, you are not using a modern distro.
With the advent of Cadence and it's suite of tools (easilly installed in Debian/Ubuntu/fedora/arch/gentoo), JACK configuration is brain-dead simple. In fact, if you enjoy the masochism that is PulseAudio, you can have it installed and make it a slave to JACK. Then all your PA-aware apps can be used in any ladspa-compatible DAW (or even via wineASIO - FL Studio anyone?).
Pulseaudio works because JACK doesn't have per-application volume control, and (IME) doesn't allow multiple programs to play audio at the same time. The first time I had those in Linux was when I started using Pulseaudio.
BTW, everything was configured by the distro, either Red Hat (or perhaps Fedora), Slackware, or Ubuntu.
Odd, I'm running Clementine right now, and the volume is at 50%, while VLC is running at 10%, and Ardour is at 100% volume. All running through JACK. Did I mention they're all playing audio at the exact same time?
sounds like per-application volume control, myself.
I'm surprised you didn't know that, considering the pomposity you took while educating me on Unix[1] above. should we be taking that comment with a similar grain of salt?
If I have to manually configure one thing, and not the other, the one I don't have to configure wins.
Pulseaudio solves my problems. JACK didn't. You can claim that JACK did, that I'm lying, that I'm crazy, or whatever. You can claim that I'm a weev-level Nazi-troll bent on destroying all that is right with the Universe. (You seem to like doing that.) The fact remains: Pulseaudio allows me to control volume independently of application and play multiple audio sources at once, whereas JACK didn't give me either of those things.
So, yes, we should be taking your knowledge of PA/JACK/UNIX with a large grain of salt.
Further, your reply is largely a strawman argument (when did I say you were lying or crazy? what's this about the Universe?), and a borderline ad-hominem. I feel this speaks for itself.
No, you shouldn't, because I'm your target audience: Techy but not interested in sound per se, which means I can do things to make it work but I am not going to undertake heroic measures to get JACK to do a fraction of what Pulseaudio does out of the box, for example.
You're just biased against Pulseaudio. There's no other explanation for it. You can't accept that Pulseaudio is a better out-of-the-box experience, and that that matters.
There was a reason he got so much vitriol: he's a terrible and manipulative person who is using political methods to push an anti-POSIX agenda. He's a Weev-level troll for an audience too stupid to realize the damage he's doing. He over-exaggerates a joke on IRC into a perceived attempt/threat on his life, and uses that as a springboard to insult Linus Torvalds for doing far more benign things than he regularly commits, whilst playing the victim card to the fullest.
I'll join the author in thanking lennart. Thank you for holding the Linux ecosystem back by politically forcing your bad monolithic software on us. Thank you for showing that not only Microsoft can implement "embrace/extend/extinguish" to ruin Linux. Thank you for showing the world how to use an open source company like red hat to muscle your changes into other distributions. Thank you for reinventing JACK's wheel. Thank you for introducing a new paper cut for every one Mark Shuttleworth endeavored to fix. Thank you for saying that people that disagree with you must obviously "hate the disabled" because they don't agree with your decisions.
And most importantly, thank you for showing how gullible and vulnerable the open source movement is. Not even Microsoft hurt Linux as much as you have, and this is with SCO vs. IBM in mind.
The next time I see him, I plan on telling him this verbatim.