Reasons you should NEVER switch to Linux on a desktop. (rant) - by lost_soul
lost_soul on 3/3/2010 at 18:05
I've been using Linux for the past five years, and up until late 2008, I was very happy with it. Over the past year and a half though, audio has gone from decent to *UBAR. In order to understand this, you must understand that on Linux, there are multiple sound "servers" that can be run in the background to handle audio requests from applications. However, only one of these servers can have a hold on the sound card at a time. This doesn't mean you can't play multiple sounds at once, but it does mean that all programs must be configured to use the same sound server, or there will be problems.
When I started out, we had ALSA. It was fast, had low CPU overhead, and generally worked well. In the past two years though, the developers have been trying to ram PulseAudio down everyone's throat, which (in my experience) causes nothing but trouble. I say "ram down everyone's throat", because PulseAudio started out as optional. Sure, it was installed by default and enabled by default, ensuring your games would have laggy sound, but you COULD disable and uninstall it to fix the problem. In the latest versions of many Linux distros, if you uninstall PulseAudio, it breaks your volume controls! The main problems with PulseAudio are the extreme latency it can introduce to sound (>60 ms) and the overhead in terms of CPU usage.
Nobody cares if PulseAudio can stream audio over the network in real time or "link" two stereo sound cards to make a surround sound system if it can't do the simple job of making sound come out of the speakers in a timely manor. Users like myself wouldn't be bashing it if it was still an optional component and not forced on us, everywhere we turn.
Thus If you value sound that just works and is played in a timely manor (and doesn't chew up the CPU), you really should stick with Windows... or a Mac.
Volca on 4/3/2010 at 07:06
I understand your frustration. Broken volume controls probably source from the fact you still have pulseaudio volume controls installed instead of the alsa volume controls. Sound was always a bit mess in Linux and since they didn't let Alsa to stabilise and force yet another sound solution atop of it, it became even a lot messier for some.
Just try (
http://www.archlinux.org/) Arch linux if you are experienced a bit, it is really modular and does not force any choices on you. I had to install pulseaudio
manually in fact since it was not installed by default.
snobel on 4/3/2010 at 09:41
While I understand your frustration too - it should be easy to go back to ALSA - I think that in the long run, when all the teething pain is over, Pulseaudio will be a vast improvement. Personally I love it because it makes my bluetooth headphones Just Work...
lost_soul on 4/3/2010 at 13:49
Wow, I installed Arch in VMware tonight, and it is pretty cool. It uses less than 80 megs of RAM with gnome running! I think I'll try installing this on my netbook tomorrow.
baeuchlein on 7/3/2010 at 19:38
I've had troubles with Linux as well from about 2008. In this case, it's Debian Linux, but some of the problems apparently are not Debian-specific.
I'm somehow getting the impression that there's a general rushing of things which are not yet finished towards the user. And often enough, Google searches reveal nothing or not much at all, suggesting they did not even realize they've broken things somewhere in the past, yet I discover it on several machines as well as Linux distributions. Someone's not doing his or her homework, it seems.:nono:
The worst example of this is that Samba clients won't connect to older operating systems anymore, but spit out error messages which are obviously wrong, such as something like "server not present" after just displaying a response of some kind from said server. It's been mentioned on the internet as early as 2006, and continues to reappear in postings up to the present, but apparently no one cares about removing that bug. They seem to be unaware as well that they don't have a problem with a specific old operating system, but with connecting to almost any system using an older method of authentication.
Of course one could say that Windows 98 is hardly an up-to-date system nowadays, but then they could have completely removed support for connecting to these systems instead of leaving a broken implementation in Samba for the last three and a half years and not even realizing it. That's why I'm still using Debian 4 instead of version 5, which would mean the end of my personal little network of older but still reliable and working machines.
And there are several other problems which have appeared during the last few years, but went unnoticed although the effects should be in plain sight for at least some people. I'm wondering sometimes - do they still test the stuff they're putting up for download, or do they leave that to all these who try to use Linux and its programs?
I know it's hard to track down bugs. I know it's almost impossible to write a program that has not a single bug in it, let alone a whole operating system as well as hundreds of programs for it. But instead of de-bugging stuff that's already halfway finished or even in use for several years, I frequently see them re-inventing the wheel instead. For example, I don't understand why they try to replace the old-style IDE drivers with some "PATA" drivers instead of just improving the older drivers. The latter have been working for centuries, and I've not heard of any particular problem with these drivers in general, or maybe with their architecture.
So much for my rant now. I could go on like this for some time, I guess.
Al_B on 7/3/2010 at 19:55
Ouch.
I'm not going to be able to fix your problem, I'm afraid. I've used Linux since 1992 and it's always been a bit of a hybrid between low level tools and various GUI addons. I use it for server functions these days for which it's extremely reliable. I've been impressed with some of the desktop versions recently but all of the ones I've tried still seem to require you to dip into the shell too frequently.
As to why you can't connect to Windows 98 shares I couldn't say for definite. Are you using smbclient or a GUI tool? Have you tried analysing the traffic with tcpdump? These questions are more than most people will tolerate.
I love Linux - really, I do. It does have advantages over Windows but for a day to day workstation operating system the time, effort and cost involved doesn't stack up.
LeatherMan on 7/3/2010 at 20:18
My biggest sound issues are directly related to Ubuntu and it's variants. All other distros worked fine, even Debian. I went back to using Mandriva last year.
baeuchlein on 8/3/2010 at 00:11
Quote Posted by Al_B
I've used Linux since 1992 and it's always been a bit of a hybrid between low level tools and various GUI addons. I use it for server functions these days for which it's extremely reliable. I've been impressed with some of the desktop versions recently but all of the ones I've tried still seem to require you to dip into the shell too frequently.
[...] I love Linux - really, I do. It
does have advantages over Windows but for a day to day workstation operating system the time, effort and cost involved doesn't stack up.
I'm playing around with Linux from about 1999, and had it ready for real use in about 2003, when I finally got the X Window system up and running reliably. Of course, it was not my main field of interest these days, or I would have likely been faster then. I'm doing more and more things with Linux, for various reasons, and have installed one Windows and one Linux OS on almost any of the computers I used since then. I have not had time to set up a Samba server with Linux yet, but it's one of several things I wish to achieve in the future. Stability is one of the reasons for using Linux, as well as some programs I've discovered over the years which I did not find for Windows at all, or only in a form I personally deem to be inferior to the Linux pendant I found.
On the other hand, there are still some Windows programs (and not all of them are games) which I have not been able to replace with Linux variants. And I didn't try out WINE yet.
I guess it will be a mix of Windows and Linux use for at least five years from now on, if not forever. Both of them have their advantages and disadvantages, and I've been an advocate for a dual installation of Windows and Linux for a long time. And I will likely continue to use Linux in the future, unless it suffers an abysmal drop in quality. Nevertheless, I'd really
like to see some improvement - concerning the quality of Linux desktop systems, I believe that there's not been much improvement since about 2005. But that might be influenced by my personal point of view.
Quote Posted by Al_B
As to why you can't connect to Windows 98 shares I couldn't say for definite. Are you using smbclient or a GUI tool? Have you tried analysing the traffic with tcpdump? These questions are more than most people will tolerate.
I had installed Debian 5 on a machine which used Debian 4 before and had no problems mounting Windows shares by "mount -t smbfs ..." (on a "real" console, not an xterm window) before. With Debian 5, however, some error messages came up instead if the share was a Win98 one. XP's shares worked almost without any problem, but Win98's just produced strange error messages.
One was "mount error 112 = Host is down" (among others), but a "smbclient -NL ..." command found the host and correctly listed all its shares. Obviously, this host was
not "down".
There were other error messages, but I have not recorded them all. However, I looked up most of them on the internet, finding several posts in Linux forums, all pointing into the same general direction.
Apparently, this problem has been present since about the time when Samba version 3 was released, and it usually cropped up with Samba v3 and older operating systems offering shares to the Linux system. The error messages vary if the mount options are changed, and some people were able to connect to their old operating systems after using some options (telling Samba the IP address of the server to connect to, or specifying that an older approach to authentication ("client with weaker LANMAN security") had to be used, and so on). But there were some people who tried everything mentioned there and still could not connect to the servers.
I was able to connect to a Windows 98 machine
once by using "smbmount" and a few Samba-related libraries, copied over from Debian 4, with Debian 5. But when I repeated the same steps again later, I did not get a connection anymore.
I have not tried to trace network traffic since it was pretty likely that the problem was a) a bug in the newer Samba version and b) related to authentication like with all the other unlucky people of whose fates I had read before. I usually gave up and installed Debian 4, partially because of other problems I had with the newer Debian 5 at that time. These I could solve afterwards, but unless there is some solution to the Samba problem, I will stay with Debian 4 for some time. Since I haven't had the time to get a Samba
server up and running (apart from a failed attempt with SWAT), there would not be any way of connecting a Windows 98 machine to a Linux one if I switched to the malfunctioning version of Samba. So it's going to be old Debian 4 for quite a while, still.
Experiments with recent Ubuntu variants (8 and 9) yielded the same problem, and the aforementioned posts on the internet were speaking of other Linux variants as well, including a Fedora variant in 2006.
However, the answers these people got from others working for official help forums for particular Linux distributions always seemed from people not realizing that a) the problem was always cropping up when a newer Samba version was in use with an older non-Linux operating system and b) was never confined to a particular OS being the server in this case. And looking around in the Samba documentation did not yield much more than a few spurious remarks about the problem scattered here and there. Somehow they haven't noticed they've got a problem there, more than three years after the earliest post I discovered.
Such things piss me off a lot, despite understanding how difficult programming and bug-hunting are.
Quote Posted by LeatherMan
My biggest sound issues are directly related to Ubuntu and it's variants. All other distros worked fine, even Debian.
Strange. Ubuntu is a "descendant" of Debian, and whenever I checked, an Ubuntu variant always had the same bugs as its Debian "father".
LeatherMan on 8/3/2010 at 06:11
Quote Posted by baeuchlein
Strange. Ubuntu is a "descendant" of Debian, and whenever I checked, an Ubuntu variant always had the same bugs as its Debian "father".
That's why I verified the issue against Debian. Ubuntu 8.04, 32 and 64 bit, had no problems with my onboard audio (ATI AD198x), but every version I tested after that (and I tested
everything available) it simply wouldn't work, and this included Kubuntu and Mint. Fedora worked, Mandriva worked, Debian worked, hell even Puppy worked.
On top of that, hard drive performance was significantly slower with Ubuntu than with any other distro, so I don't miss Ubuntu.
baeuchlein on 9/3/2010 at 10:36
Well, Ubuntu was created by starting with a Debian system and changing it in order to make it easier to get it installed, for people who don't want to spend an eternity with Linux just to get it running. As far as I can tell from the few experiments I did with Ubuntu, this approach was fairly successful, although - as I already said - it has inherited several bugs from his "father".
But since I had enough experience with Debian by the time I heard of Ubuntu, I do not really need the latter. However, it may still be an interesting distribution for Linux novices, since it usually provides the user with a bootable CD including a running X server, without much hassle. Debian, on the other hand, just takes the user to the installer, and then wants to be installed "the classical way", from the disks. And the many questions it throws at you can be too much for Linux novices.
