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0 pointsTylerE12y ago0 comments

This approach to things is what killed Ubuntu (yes, killed, not is killing). See PulseAudio, Unity, etc

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9 comments · 2 top-level

gtaylor12y ago· 5 in thread

Why does PulseAudio have anything to do with Ubuntu? AFAIK, there is no relation between the two, other than the fact that Ubuntu offers PulseAudio (along with almost every other distro).

ekianjo12y ago

I must admit that, more than once, an Ubuntu upgrade killed my audio and I had to go and fix it myself. It's really painful that a distro that wants to be number 1 is so broken at times.

tomswartz0712y ago

I don't think it's more that they push non-prod ready packages (yes, they do) but the fact that their update model doesn't easily allow them to fix bugs from upstream.

The vast majority of the packages in Ubuntu (more notably in the LTS releases) are all custom patched by Ubu-devs. Rather than taking the raw package and pushing it through, they have a semi-opaque method of testing, patching, and then releasing to the greater community.

I've tried several times to get an 'in' so that I could help with the process, but it seems to me like a 'club hangout' where outsiders are slightly discouraged. :(

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davidgerard12y ago

I routinely update Ubuntu well before release day, on the theory that my bugs are 100% more likely to get fixed before the release than after it.

My experiences fixing the resulting brokenness and occasional unbootability is why I first claimed Ubuntu/Debian on my CV.

pekk12y ago

What distro do you propose instead that has equally fresh packages and more stability?

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Shish2k12y ago

Ubuntu pushed pulse before it was production ready -- I like that they did that, because it accelerated the production-readiness of a great idea with buggy implementation, and I'm using debian where stability matters anyway :P

jamesgeck012y ago· 2 in thread

I have heard that most of the trouble everyone had with PulseAudio had less to do with PulseAudio itself and more to do with terrible audio drivers that did all sorts of awful things when commanded to do relatively basic tasks by anything more complicated than Alsa.

nitrogen12y ago

Not for me. ALSA was fantastic for me, I had custom routing set up with LADSPA processing, very low latency, and multi-stream mixing. Pulse doesn't do nearly as much for me.

makomk12y ago

At least one of the PulseAudio features that's enabled by default - flat volumes - also expects audio hardware to behave in ways that wasn't in any spec and in some cases probably wasn't even physically possible, and even on hardware that behaves perfectly it causes annoying volume glitches all the time.

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