Linux Sound Subsystem Begins Cleaning Up Its Terminology To Meet Inclusive Guidelines

[Gusar]

Wow... so many white privileged bigots demonstrating their ignorance of the issue in here today.

Nope. Just people recognizing that changing terminology in a tech context, terminology that never had anything to do with race (because it's, you know, about _tech_ not about people), will do exactly *zero* to actually improve the situation of underprivileged groups. And is therefor a waste of time.

[drownthepoor]

Yes, You're right ^^ In my opinion audio is the weakest part of current Linux ecosystem (I'm waiting for PipeWire, I hope that it will bring significant improve to this case), but I see that maintainers prefer to waste a time for some stupid name changes... Really they want to change names all the time when someone will say that generic word is something offending?!

BTW. In near future some countries will be back to pictographic writing systems, because all standard words will be banned :P

Honestly, Linux audio was one of the first things I loved about it when I started using it in 2014. And that was JUST ALSA/Pulseaudio. The ability to route audio and paprefs features that added virtual devices for multi-in/out and networked audio was awesome to me. That was all before I started recording/making music with JACK.
Now with JACK I can route audio in/out of JACK & Pulseaudio. On my Youtube channel I'm doing a video about producing music with Linux and my condenser mic is too sensitive for this room so with JACK I can run it through a gate, envelope-filter, and compressor before it goes into OBS, but then I can demo KX/Ubuntu Studio's using JACK and my MIDI Piano inside of a VM and route that to OBS separately via Pulseaudio. And I can run VM's on remote machines and capture JACK over the network.
It's an awesome level of control.

[sverris]

This is TOTALLY going to fix racism and bigotry around the world in no time at all... definitely this is one of the sources of those things.

Little jimmy starts using Linux when young, by early teenage years of been exposed to black and white lists, he's a full blown confederate red-neck racist! TRUTH!

You are missing the point. No one say that this fixes a lot. No one says that saying blacklist etc. proofs that some one is a racist. The point is that language permanently reproduces cliches and stereotypes - aside from what a speaker intends. And it is kind of absurd: there is never a clear cut what might sound offending in some contexts or not. Language is fluent, and even a very positive word can sound very negative in some situations, ie just by saying it with a certain tone. Yet we teach children to learn what to say and which words to avoid. For good reasons. Because the freedom of speech also has its limits, and because words can really hurt.

I do not know if those changes in terminology in the kernel community are necessary, but the discussion around it is still a good thing.

[sverris]

We need to stop calling them liberals and begin referring to them as exactly what they are: American communists, that wish to partake in the destruction of western civilization.

Haha. I grew up in a communist country, and I can tell you that avoiding blacklist or not using it in the kernel etc. is still a 'tiny bit' away from communism or the destruction of the western civilization.

[Auzy]

Audio on Linux can still be a pain in the ass, but at least it won't offend you now

At least Audio has gotten MUCH better.. eSound/Arts/Alsa days were a TOTAL nightmare.

The only real problem we have is JACK/Low Latency, and Pipewire will hopefully fix that (it's expected to be a drop-in for Pulseaudio long term, but will complete the picture). It's actually really exciting to see them finish the last few parts of Linux which were lacking (Wayland is next).

Honestly though, I doubt most computer programmers are part of the problem here (most of us are nerds and don't even know who we are talking to online). It's good to see them trying to make a difference though, but doubt it will have any impact (and doesn't fix the actual problem).

[gnulinux82]

I can tell you that avoiding blacklist or not using it in the kernel etc. is still a 'tiny bit' away from communism or the destruction of the western civilization.

This is just one small facet of of the big picture though. If you are aware of the phrase "the long march through the institutions", you can already see the writing on the wall. Just because it's still a way off doesn't mean things aren't headed that way.

[Aryma]

I can't help it if you choose to be blind to reality.

what reality are you talking about ?
do you know that your SJW and cancel/wake culture is joke and cancer?

[mlau]

I doubt that the individuals responsible for this crap are motivated by communism. My personal opinion is that these are bored and/or useless people, who are looking for fulfillment, and the easiest way to to them to achieve that is to combat a perceived inequality, here in language. What's troubling is is that society as a whole pays so much
attention to internet social media. In normal life these people would at worst get their face punched and the matter would disappear, but on the internet their voice
is paid so much attention, which further encourages them (and others).

In the alsa case here, and linux in general, I now believe that the maintainers have come to the conclusion that all this language-terrorist is inevitable, and instead of
fighting it and distracting developers for an extended period of time, they decided to get it over with quickly so that the terrorist mob can move on to harass other projects and linux can continue development in peace.

[gnulinux82]

I doubt that the individuals responsible for this crap are motivated by communism. My personal opinion is that these are bored and/or useless people, who are looking for fulfillment, and the easiest way to to them to achieve that is to combat a perceived inequality, here in language.

That's probably true, but I'm willing to be many of them don't just stop at this kind of petty activism. I know for a fact that many of these agitators openly support Antifa on their blogs and on Twitter. Linus' own daughter even signed the "Post-Meritocracy Manifesto", which is a truly insane document written by a mentally ill person.

In the alsa case here, and linux in general, I now believe that the maintainers have come to the conclusion that all this language-terrorist is inevitable, and instead of
fighting it and distracting developers for an extended period of time, they decided to get it over with quickly so that the terrorist mob can move on to harass other projects

Yeah, I also think this seems to be the case. To be honest, it's probably the smartest thing to do. It seems as if Linus has also settled on this approach too -- appease and placate and hope they fuck off quickly.

[Aryma]

Linux is a joke we have audio is crap compared to win or mac and let's not talk about video driver and hardware acceleration and this what kernel developer wastes time to fix?

like other articles, I think anyone can handle kernel development manager better than Linus Torvalds at this point if he thinks this is important and will fix anything