Lennart Poettering On The Open-Source Community: A Sick Place To Be In

[ssokolow]

DITTO. Every person with 2 or more soundcards must hate ALSA and love PulseAudio, plain and simple.

Actually, I have multiple audio devices as and ALSA dmix worked flawlessly for me for over half a decade while, despite my best efforts, the only way I've been able to keep PulseAudio from crackling is to force it to run on top of dmix.

It was only maybe a month ago that Ubuntu's not-QAed-without-PulseAudio ALSA config decided my USB-MIDI device was the default soundcard and I decided to hasten my yearly "Give PulseAudio another chance" event.

This year, despite much googling, I'm going to have to bite the bullet and return to ALSA dmix because PulseAudio is forcing me to choose between crackling in some apps (run it normally with any settings I can find) or clipping in some other apps (run it on top of dmix to resolve the crackling).

...also, for whatever reason, starting up pavucontrol causes the pulseaudio Daemon to suddenly start consuming an extra ~7% of a CPU core on my Athlon II X2 270. Given that, as I've tuned it (using stuff like src-linear resampling), it only takes 6% to actually MIX two audio streams (2% to play a single one), that's ridiculous.

[mythos]

@ssokolow

tsched=0

you are welcome?

[drspinderwalf]

A few things: I'm glad for Gnome, I'm thrilled for pulseaudio, and I'm okay with systemd. If I weren't any of these three, I shouldn't resort to teenage banter and death threats. It's pitiful. I have no allegiance one way or another. In the end, it's software tech that gets things done in slightly different ways - it's FOSS and it makes my system work so that I can work on important things to me. My systems currently run better than I've ever had them run before.

If you find yourself in hair-raising anger or fear from this whole embarrassment, I advise a good walk through your nearest park; visit some mountains if you have some near. Put some perspective in your life, because losing your head over a piece of code is just complete silliness. If enough people hate the software, there will be alternatives. In the meantime, deal with it or fix the problem yourself.

On another note, the youtube video seemed like LP defending himself against a barrage of attacks from the speaker, who dictated his concerns in a most poor manner. While LP's responses were not all good, he makes very good arguments for having GDM pull the stack - Accessibility truly is an important feature, and hobbled together environments like XFCE really lack the polish that Gnome is really starting to get.

(Did that last paragraph get you angry? Please, go take a relaxing stroll. I am but an insignificant person and one shouldn't send death threats to me).

[Artemis3]

A much more civilized action is to simply refuse to use his software. And i fail to see distros understand the issues.

By extension, software that depends on his software should also be avoided like the plague. But he has every right to do these things, and joking about his life is immature and borderline threatening.

As much as i dislike his software, this "joke" about a hitman is unacceptable. Linus should also know better...

That said his counter attacks to the community are also unwarranted, he is begging to escalate the issues, almost challenging everyone.

What i don't understand is how so many distros happily adopted systemd. At least canonical made systemd-shim, but how come debian quickly adopted it?

I guess we will see new forks of some major distros soon.

[NotMine999]

TL;DR: shouldn't the current vocal minorities that disagree with systemd be the ones that do the fork?

So is the glass "half full" or "half empty"?

The point I am making is pretty simple: Either group could fork and go off in their own direction.

[NotMine999]

Not Quite....

No it hasn't and that's all bullshit.

You get 20 people in a room with 20 different opinions and nothing gets done.

When you get 20 people in a room that cannot talk objectively about something, then nothing gets done.

When you get 20 people in a room that are not willing too see opinions other than their own, then nothing gets done.

When you get 20 people in a room that can objectively discuss their own opinions, can understand the actual task in front of them, and are willing to consider & honestly discuss the opinions of others, then you might stand a chance at getting something done, but ultimately the entire matter rests on getting people to focus on the problem(s) that brought them together in the first place.

[nanonyme]

Meh, I hate to agree with Poettering but if the source is 4chan then he's right: sociopaths and psycopaths at their best, a pretty fucked up community.

Places like 4chan are a real gift to governments bent on regulating the Internet. The more of that sort of filth there is on the Internet, the easier it is to sell to large masses that the Internet needs full-blown censorship.

[NotMine999]

True

The Internet is full of assholes. You, me and everybody else.

I am surprised that Lennart is now beginning to understand some of the world around him. He should realize that a$$holes are everywhere in the world. All humans have one, and some use them for purposes other than what they were intended. Sometimes people are "just that way" and sometimes our own behavior brings out the a$$hole attitude in others. Getting along in life sometimes comes down to avoiding the former as best you can and trying not to antagnozie the latter as best you can, and doing all of that without losing your own values in the process.

Maybe that old saying is true: "You can catch more flys with honey than you can with vinegar."

As for the a$$holes making threats against Lennart, that is totally inappropriate and inexcusable. Even making jokes like that about anyone are "in poor taste".

[emblemparade]

Sigh.

Poettering is not leaving FLOSS. He just felt that after so much grief it would be worth making a general statement about it -- and as he said, it will be the last one. For his mental and emotional health, I hope it will indeed be the last one.

You need a thick skin to be in the public eye. It's always been hard to be a celebrity, but the Internet has made it so much harder because of anonymity. There are no "heroes": if you are a hero, it will only be for a short while before they tear you down. The issue is much bigger than free software. I mean, look at the world of computer gaming: the recent "gamergate" nonsense was ten times worse than anything Poettering experienced. Gabe Newell, for example, gets both a lot of love and a lot of hate. The more success Valve has, the more he will be demonized.

Poettering, just keep doing what you're doing. Listen to criticism if it's sensible, but don't let the personal attacks get to you. Stay strong, bro.

Amazingly, so many people don't know the difference between criticizing an idea and criticizing a person. Don't like his products? Don't use them. Attacking him personally says more about your own problems than anything about him.

The fact is that Poettering's work has made a huge impact. PulseAudio has pretty much become the standard for audio servers in free software. systemd is right now being adopted by the major free operating systems. Again, if you don't like running his software on your personal devices for some reason, there are plenty of free software alternatives.

The only true villain in free software is Hans Reiser.

[kayosiii]

Lennart gets way more hate than he deserves. Lots of people hate change and Lennart has caused a lot of it, usually but not always for the better.

I don't think targetting Linus in the way he has is not particularly fair. Linus as far as I can tell is only abusive when somebody has f*cked up, I think the motivation there is to give that person an emotional jarring to help them to remember not to make the same mistake again. On the other hand I think that Linus could still deliver that emotional shock without resorting to ad hominem attacks. Linus is being a little bit lazy on that count.

4chan on the other hand now there is a social experiment that went horribly horribly wrong.