High School friend showed me their install, and how it had these sick spinning cube desktop. Ditched it once I realized I couldn’t do anything I wanted on it.
In University, the ComSci labs all had networked machines with Ubuntu installed. It was cool, but again outside of coding, I couldn’t do anything I wanted on it.
2022, I got a new Laptop, couldn’t use Windows 11 without an account (I know of the work arounds). MS has Windows 10 with a EOL in 2025, and Valve is pushing the Steam Deck hard. Gave it a second shot. I now can do everything I want on it without issue. I even made a 1 year retrospective video about it.
I meant alternatives to systemd-homed, systemd-machined and the likes. Since I’m on NixOS, I’m restricted to most of the systemd stuff. I’m not even sure if I need all of them.
Now I’m being dragged into the anti-systemd ideology. I have a bunch of CLI utility that I have never ever touched since the three years I’ve been on Linux. I just came across homectl, machinectl and timedatectl, and I’m convinced that the part about “bloat” does make a lot of sense now.
I don’t really care either way. I like things to be more minimal, but I’m not really anti-systemd or anything like that. I’ve just been using openrc for a few years now, and haven’t used systemd enough to learn about the homed stuff I guess
Fedora immutable (ublue kinoite) has been so bulletproof. Moved from Arch, which is now on distrobox, so painless. Now ~ 1 year… 2 laptops + desktop, other is destined for NixOS…
The last straw was when I had a 24 hours render running, and Windows decided to update and reboot 1 hour before it was done. I was using the computer at the time, RAM, CPU, and GPU were all at max, the mouse was being moved, I clicked “later” every time the update pop-up appeared, and it still rebooted.
Linux does what I tell it to, and doesn’t do what I tell it not to do. I didn’t think that was a big ask until Windows.
I’ve been using PipeWire this year on my Void Linux laptop & desktop. It’s been mostly OK but has a few problems. For years I have been using plain ALSA (with no custom configuration) because pulseaudio causes me regular issues across multiple machines (mostly silently failing).
Pros:
I don’t have to use Chromium for my mic to work on online video conf (WTF Firefox)
“EasyEffects” lets me quickly fix crappy youtube audio (bad gain normalisation, way too much sibilance) with a minimum of effort.
Cons:
Sometimes breaks all audio until I manually restart it (hey, just like pulseaudio. This problem never happens when using ALSA straight)
First time setup is complicated, involving environment variables, dbus user session buses and multiple daemons (running just pipewire isn’t enough). Why can’t it handle this all itself? Surely it should notice if these things are missing and just fix it itself? Compare this to straight ALSA where you (1) do nothing and then (2) everything works (except Firefox mic support)
I can’t have multiple audio outputs all unmuted at the same time. Eg my headphone output and my rear speaker output. If I override this (using alsamixer) then it gets forgotten next boot anyway, it seems to be out of scope of PipeWire’s understanding.
Sometimes breaks all audio until I manually restart it (hey, just like pulseaudio. This problem never happens when using ALSA straight)
Well, how much lennart is in this thing? Not only can that predict how well it’s going to work, but also how soon it’ll be fixed, how responsive the ‘team’ will be to bug reports, how compatible it’ll be with other system components AND whether ‘compatibility’ will be achieved before the entire OS has been systematically imported into (and badly replicated by) the project.
If you check SystemD, its a HUGE step up, which is why everyone is using it now (whereas, the old scripts had race conditions, were a pain to write and other issues). Anyone who has written both can tell you how much better things are now…
The fact this issue is happening on both Pipewire and Pulseaudio also suggests it’s more likely a bug in the drivers… It might not be obvious on ALSA directly, but that doesn’t mean an issue doesn’t exist there…
And honestly, the situation before PulseAudio was awful. Audio not working was a common issue, and low latency audio was the least of anyone’s problems. Whereas, these days, because of Pulseaudio, even gaming is a thing now (back then, I even saw issues on tuxracer, and Unreal tournament back in the days).
In regards to setup, most distributions will handle that anyway I’m guessing. So not sure why the configuration process should matter unless you’re in Arch or Slackware? As long as the distribution handles it, it shouldn’t matter. It’d really a non-issue honestly.
I do a lot of middleware development and we’re regularly blamed by users for bugs/problems upstream too (which is why we’ve now added a huge amount of enduser diagnostics/metrics in our products which has made it more obvious the issues aren’t related to us). In practice, very few people have issues with Pulseaudio (I haven’t seen issues since launch). Sometimes as well, keep in mind it can be the sound interface (especially if its USB)
If you check SystemD, its a HUGE step up, which is why everyone is using it now
I think that’s a “winners write history” situation. There were other options at the time that might have been better choices. Everyone uses it now because of Redhat and Debian being upstream to most users, desktop and corporate. I was not surprised by Redhat adopting it (it’s their own product) but Debian was quite the shock.
Yes systemd is definitely a step up from traditional initscripts (oh god). In terms of simplicity, reliability and ease of configuration however it’s a step below other options (like runit). I don’t have distro management experience but, given the problems I’ve encountered with different init systems over the years, I suspect there would be less of a maintenance burden with the other options.
I’m very curious about the downvotes to this one. May I ask people’s thoughts? Perhaps I’m too vague? I can put a bigger story about my experiences with various init systems in production & research if people are interested.
The fact this issue is happening on both Pipewire and Pulseaudio also suggests it’s more likely a bug in the drivers… It might not be obvious on ALSA directly, but that doesn’t mean an issue doesn’t exist there…
I probably made the overlap unclear, sorry:
Pipewire issues: My 2023 desktop and 2016 laptop, very different hardware.
Pulseaudio issues: All of my pre-2023 desktops and several family laptops
I do a lot of middleware development and we’re regularly blamed by users for bugs/problems upstream too (which is why we’ve now added a huge amount of enduser diagnostics/metrics in our products which has made it more obvious the issues aren’t related to us).
Eep, that’s annoying. You also probably don’t have direct interaction with the users most of the time (they’re not your customer) which makes this worse, people in a vacuum follow each other’s stories.
In practice, very few people have issues with Pulseaudio (I haven’t seen issues since launch). Sometimes as well, keep in mind it can be the sound interface (especially if its USB)
There might be a bias here because these problems are not persistent, ie a reboot fixes them.
In regards to setup, most distributions will handle that anyway I’m guessing. So not sure why the configuration process should matter unless you’re in Arch or Slackware? As long as the distribution handles it, it shouldn’t matter. It’d really a non-issue honestly.
That’s potentially more things different distros can do differently and more issues your middleware will start getting blamed for.
Yes it’s not a problem for user-friendly distros, but why does the user friendliness problem exist anywhere anyway? It’s better to fix problems upstream, not downstream.
I needed something lighter than windows 7 basic on a cheap network my girlfriend at the time (now wife) bought me when we were in high school. Ended up using Ubuntu 11.10 netbook edition. After spending 5 hours getting my Broadcom wireless card working, I was hooked. Used it until that laptop died and during that time I slowly migrated all of my computers to Linux. Only kept windows on secondary drives or a different partition for the occasional time I need it.
I’ve been using Linux off and on again for the past decade.
The original reason I used Linux was because as a kid I got stuck with whatever old laptop was laying around, so my dad would install Ubuntu to make it usable.
When I built my first computer a couple years ago and started using Windows 10, that’s when Windows stopped working for me. Nothing made me want to switch more than when the major Windows 10 updates broke my software every 6 months.
I had dual boot with Win10, which I used for almost everything, and Arch, for SSH-able stuff for work and university. One day Windows decided to nuke both the EFI partition and Arch, which made Windows itself unbootable, so I just wiped the entire disk and installed Manjaro. Now I’m a sysadmin and I don’t think I could do my job if I had to use Windows.
I was being encouraged to learn programming by my brother-in-law, so when I was going through the lessons in the course he bought there was a section on Linux. At first I was thinking on how would I be able to install in a virtual machine but my brother-in-law in all his wisdom said “why don’t you dual-boot”. After some planning so I don’t nuke my hard drive and flashing LMDE as my first distro I installed Linux and did the rest of the course there.
My dad gave me a laptop running ubuntu as my first computer many years ago and I have never found any non-linux operating system I really liked. There are some things I love about Haiku, but it just isn’t quite good enough to replace Linux for me, at least not yet
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