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Same thing with Pulse Audio

People cursed the name for years, because it exposed all of the terrible, glitchy audio hardware drivers and refused on general principle to work around the issues to the degree that previous audio solutions had. And the result was that while the experience was inconsistent and buggy for years, it did eventually drag the Linux audio stack into a better place.


PulseAudio dragged linux to replacing that stinkin pile of garbage with PipeWire.

The argument that can be made is that we never would've gotten PipeWire without going through PulseAudio first.

We got the much superior jack two years before pulseaudio was even a thing.

Pulseaudio was a derail of Linux audio. We could have skipped it entirely.


Comparing JACK and PulseAudio is like comparing apples and oranges. And honestly, JACK by itself is unsuitable as an audio server for general desktop usage.

JACK doesn’t support device hotplug (ya know, connecting and disconnecting a headset, something most of us do) and it also doesn’t support multiple applications generating audio without the user having to configure how audio is mixed.

JACK is designed for low latency in environments like Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) where you know 1) what audio hardware is present at all times, and 2) what applications are going to generate audio.

Many people who use/used JACK ran a PulseAudio bridge on top of it for every application that wasn’t the one or two applications that needed ultra low latency audio.

PulseAudio had some major warts, but JACK wasn’t some panacea that did everything better.


Pulseaudio was, is, and always will be trash.

The ALSA drivers for all the creative labs cards worked perfectly well. I never had any issues at all under ALSA, or under OSS before that.

I've had tons of issues with audio bugs once pulseaudio was introduced. To this day the most common solution to any audio issue I see is `pkill -9 pulseaudio`. And it solves the problem about 99% of the time.


It also used a large multiple more memory than Alsa + basically any existing plausible combo of mixer software on top of alsa. While doing nothing. For no clear reason. And chewed processor cycles, while doing nothing. Back when 50MB was a meaningful amount of memory, and most machines were still single-core.

It was plainly really poorly-architected, just looking at its resource use patterns made this obvious in a heartbeat.


It also introduced fun new audio bugs and indeterminate latency. Which still haven't gone away entirely in 2026. To such an extent that any time I have an audio issue, I reflexively `pkill -9 pulseaudio` and about 99% of the time the problem just vanishes.

On the first machine where I had pulseaudio foisted on me - an 800mhz single core Duron - pulseaudio used literally 20% of my CPU time...

...At idle. When no audio was playing...

...To do software audio mixing which my creative labs audio hardware was capable of doing better and for free.

When I filed an issue with the pulseaudio people, saying "hey, you're wasting 20% of my CPU time at idle when no audio is playing because you're ignoring the fact that I have superior hardware that can do audio mixing for free", they closed the issue saying that pulseaudio wasn't meant to be used in situations where you have dedicated hardware for audio mixing.


It's a shame. In the late 2010s there was a lot of hope for Satya Nadella, but it seems like the organization has regressed back to the mean.

Which is sad because the CEO's job is not to focus on the individual body parts but to make sure that the whole system is strong, beautiful, and healthy.

They can afford people who would do better. Windows 11 is trash. Azure is trash. Onedrive is trash. Outlook is trashier than it has ever been before, but it's not quite trash yet. Word is trash. Excel is rapidly enshittifying. Copilot is hot flaming radioactive tar cancer.

Does microslop even have a single thing left that isn't either completely terrible or worse than it used to be a mere 5 years ago?


> Outlook is trashier than it has ever been before

Which one? There’s two now! Lol


Both. "New" outlook doesn't work with all of the add-ons and plug ins that "classic" outlook did. Both new and classic have copilot wedged into them. Classic has unasked for and unwanted Linkedin integrations that have to be turned off on a per-user basis, and it is patently clear that microslop has every intention of abandoning classic outlook the instant they believe that they can do so without severely alienating their userbase.

Well, it sounds like they are effectively slaves to the government, who is raking in their income on their behalf, and would presumably be able to "activate" them as an insider threat at some point.

All of the progressives combined were putting up lower numbers than Biden alone in several states, and Biden and moderates combined in nearly every state. It wasn't "rigged" and progressives convincing themselves that it was is MAGA-style revisionism.

I also have to admire the irony of Bernie supporters acting entitled to a coronation / noncompetitive primary after the kinds of things they said in 2016.


On the other hand, voting needs to mean something. If voting doesn't mean anything, because the whole system is held in a vice grip by a sclerotic institution playing power games with itself, then the broader system eventually collapses.

My personal opinion is that Mitch McConnell's intransigence and unwillingness to do anything lest Obama get credit for it led directly to an increased desire for a "strongman"


Anthropic and the Government both signed a contract. Anthropic is still abiding the terms of that contract. The Government is demanding that they be able to disobey the contract.


Everything is negotiable, and the Negotiator in Chief clearly likes to pull all the levers he can find, legal or not. (Well, the Supreme Court ruled that it's all legal if he does it, right?)


Implementation details TBH. They want “their boys” to do as said. No respect to agreement or legality as we can see in other dealings. They hold all they cards.


It's not an "implementation detail." Either obeying contract law subjects you to being designated a supply-chain risk, or it does not, and that decision has ramifications outside this "implementation."


Irrelevant. The president holds all the cards, he is above the law and you are a supply chain risk if you ask anything else other than “how high” when you are told to jump. Laws or contracts are things in the past. The most a contract can do is define your limits and obligations, not your rights or privileges,


If the president can come to your house and burn it down, do we just throw up our hands and say, well he holds all the cards, oh well. Or do we call that out as being a bad thing?


> The president holds all the cards, he is above the law

This is provably not true. The fastest way for this to become true is to believe it, or at least to parrot it, even in a facetious way.


> The president holds all the cards, he is above the law

Even though it seems that way, he really isn't, even now. Many of his EOs and other actions have been struck down in court, and while compliance with court orders has been far from perfect (another alarming trend), Trump has not actually gotten away with doing everything he wants to do.

I do fear for the future of this country, for rule of law, and the democractic norms that degrade day by day. But Trump is not actually above the law, as much as he wants to be.


You got downvoted a bit but I upvoted. You're clearly being descriptive in your statements, not prescriptive. I tend to agree that this is how things are now.

Our country is not being run by the rule of law right now.


Wrong ... their very first words were "Isn’t it actually quite fair ..."


I wasn't speaking about the top of the chain. Merely the last couple of replies about the situation WRT how things are actually operating.


Well, that's not the way context works and it's dishonest BS. You wrote "You got downvoted a bit but I upvoted. You're clearly being descriptive in your statements, not prescriptive." -- no, they were prescriptive from the start, and the prescription and the goalpost moving and wool-over-eyes pulling is why they were downvoted.

I won't respond further.


Within the context provided…. You should consider reading the whole argument.


> That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM.

In some ways. Less so in others.

For products that get commoditized for home use, the "business focused" high-margin solutions generally lose out to the commoditized solutions focused on end consumers in the long term.


Yeah. It's telling that this story is about their discord channel, not Teams.


An almost bigger irony is that most of those complaining would almost certainly have lamented in the past about leaders sending their nations poor to fight instead of going after each other directly. But now "that's illegal" (not just the war, but specifically the decapitation strikes)


My LDL is stuck between 145 and 155 permanently. Same for my mom and aunts. Oatmeal, exercise, etc. doesn't help.

I'm still young so my doctor isn't terribly concerned, but in 10 years I'll probably have to be on statins.


You should question this and advocate for yourself. The important number is total lifetime exposure to LDL (actually apoB, but doctors aren't routinely testing that yet). The arterial damage is cumulative. You shouldn't wait until you are at high risk of cardiac events to take action. The time to slow down the progression is now.

I'm just replying based on taking your comment at face value. LDL of 150 is very high and living with that for many years is very damaging. Obviously it's something between you and your doctor, I'm just encouraging you to consider and get reasoning from your doctor about whether this approach is really best for your health.


It's a borderline kinda thing. He said if it was consistently in the 160s he would probably recommend them. My previous doctor was basically in the same camp but had me taking blood tests every 3 months for a year to see if it was stuck there.


Did you miss that time Russia sent multiple kill squads after Zelensky? Seems like it's been on the table for a few years now.


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