[arch-general] Lennart Poettering on udev-systemd

[Brandon Watkins]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 7:03 PM, Norbert Zeh <nzeh at cs.dal.ca> wrote:

> David Benfell [2012.08.14 1535 -0700]:
> > What I think is unfortunate about the discussion of systemd here has
> > been that it has been conflated with the discussion of pulseaudio. I
> > think it is possible to like one and not the other.
>
> Indeed.  The heated discussion about systemd actually had the effect that
> I gave
> it a whirl to find out for myself what the fuss is all about, and I must
> say
> that I quite like it so far, while I find pulseaudio is an abysmal piece of
> software.  So I think your point is a good one.
>
> On the other hand, in my mind, pulseaudio has quite some bearing on the
> discussion about systemd.  There have been endless complaints about this
> and
> that piece of hardware not working well with pulseaudio, and I myself
> never got
> my mic to work properly with pulseaudio and recently started to experience
> serious audio delays when playing sound through pulseaudio.  Yet,
> Poettering's
> response to these kinds of complaints are usually completely dismissive:
> it's
> ALSA's fault, your hardware isn't working properly, etc, in spite of
> everything
> working flawlessly when pulseaudio doesn't get in the way.  So, to me the
> problem with systemd is not so much that I am afraid of changing to a new
> init
> system - I am not - it's the author.  What if somewhere down the road
> things
> start to go wrong with systemd?  Is Poettering's response going to be
> again that
> systemd is perfect and it's some other part of my system that's causing
> systemd
> to misbehave?  I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
>
> Cheers,
> Norbert
>
This is due to the fact that pulseaudio utilizes the audio drivers in
different ways than straight alsa, exposing previously unknown or ignored
driver bugs. there is only so much pulseaudio can do to work around buggy
drivers.