[ale] for all you systemd haters...

[Solomon Peachy]

On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 01:00:05PM -0800, Alex Carver via Ale wrote:
> Just remember that Pottering was primarily responsible for Pulse Audio
> and, although perhaps it's working better now, he pushed it hard
> claiming it was ready and it was not leading to a severe hatred for it.
> He pushed hard enough that, in his very typical style, was calling out
> any distribution that did not install it by default.  Later he
> backtracked saying he never claimed it was ready.

That's fair to say.  

My personal experience with PA is that most of the end-user pain was due 
to Ubuntu utterly botching its integration and not really doing anything 
to improve things.  (Fedora, despite using what essentially amounted to 
the same PA releases, suffered far fewer problems.)

Well, that and buggy drivers, buggy applications [often relying on 
quirks of individual drivers], and bugs bugs bugs and even more bugs 
everywhere.  Moral of the story: Linux Audio was a complete festering 
mess before PA came along, and becoming an even greater mess until 
everyone finally got serious about deploying bugfixes.  I'm personally 
glad he pushed so hard, we all benefited in the end.  (And amazed he 
keeps coming back for more.  He must have skin made of asbestos..)

(This situation paralleled NetworkManager and the multitude of wifi 
 drivers that all behaved subtly or not so subtly differently...)

> I think if systemd had been spearheaded by anyone other than Pottering
> it probably would have gotten an improved reputation or at minimum would
> have had an opportunity to demonstrate itself and sell the idea on the
> merits.  There are plenty of people that improve the things we use but
> are not even remotely as sour as Pottering.  For systemd, Pottering's
> previous actions with Pulse Audio basically guaranteed that he burned
> the bridge before he crossed it.

A big difference is that systemd wasn't disruptive to the typical 
end-user, could be incrementally utilized, and didn't require folks to 
rewrite anything except muscle memory.  

(It's worth noting that systemd paying attention to return codes rapidly 
 demonstrated a whole ton of bugs in supposedly-mature-and-robust 
 distro init scripts.  But guess who got blamed...)

The average joe wouldn't have noticed any outward difference beyond 
faster boot times, distro writers and a decent chunk of their userbase 
went "hell yeah this is better", a smaller subset of their userbase 
still hasn't stopped screaming about ethics in init systems, and most 
users were like "meh, whatever.."

Anyway.  Simulations finally about to finish.  I guess I'll have to go 
off and be productive now.

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy			       pizza at shaftnet dot org
Coconut Creek, FL                          ^^ (email/xmpp) ^^
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 195 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20180216/1b5ef14a/attachment.sig>