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posted by cmn32480 on Sunday July 16 2017, @09:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the for-the-Linux-noobs dept.

Datamation examines the Debian and Ubuntu distros in detail by starting with the question, what is the difference between Debian and Ubuntu? Neither GNU/Linux distro has been out of Distrowatch's top six since 2005, and for the last four years neither has been out of the top three. There are good reasons for that. Though if systemd is not your cup of tea, there is also a Debian fork, Devuan, which is basically Debian GNU/Linux minus systemd.


[Ed Note: For many in the community who are Linux experts, this article may have no appeal. For those of us that are new to it and trying to learn, something this basic is a nice read and contains good information.]

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by bart9h on Sunday July 16 2017, @04:52PM (12 children)

    by bart9h (767) on Sunday July 16 2017, @04:52PM (#539934)

    To be Poettering free, one would also have to remove the dreaded pulseaudio system.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 16 2017, @08:32PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 16 2017, @08:32PM (#540013)

    Does Ubuntu still include avahi by default? [google.com]

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday July 20 2017, @01:21AM

      by kaszz (4211) on Thursday July 20 2017, @01:21AM (#541733) Journal

      Why do you point to a un-encrypted google search link instead of say a wikipedia [wikipedia.org] page that explains it all in 16 words?

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by KiloByte on Sunday July 16 2017, @11:59PM (8 children)

    by KiloByte (375) on Sunday July 16 2017, @11:59PM (#540083)

    I can't quite fathom why anyone would still keep PulseAudio as the default sound system. It's only upside left is that some environments have GUI configurators aimed towards PulseAudio only, but that's self-inflicted damage.

    It used to be the case that ALSA allowed "cheap" cards to be used by only one program at once, but ALSA can do its own mixing since a decade ago. And it does that far better than PulseAudio (the latter used to take 7% of a core even with no sound playing — nowadays, with Moore's law, it has been optimized to take 12%. And wakeups kill battery much faster than the percentage CPU use would suggest.).

    To have working sound, PulseAudio needs working ALSA. The converse is not true. Thus, the set of machines where sound works with PulseAudio is a strict subset of those with working ALSA.

    Out of 4 machines with a screen permanently attached I own, PulseAudio works and works adequately on exactly 0. One has a quiet but infuriating noise when no nothing is playing + total corruption after suspend. Second does a kernel OOPS (not strictly speaking PulseAudio's fault but ALSA works ok, and I can fix that — yay sourceless vendor kernels (Omega OAN133 arm laptop)). Third has silence with Pulse, I did not waste much time debugging. Fourth: compare yourself [angband.pl].

    --
    Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
    • (Score: 2) by KiloByte on Monday July 17 2017, @12:14AM

      by KiloByte (375) on Monday July 17 2017, @12:14AM (#540085)

      s/can fix/can't fix/, d'oh.

      --
      Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
    • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Monday July 17 2017, @06:30AM (2 children)

      by cubancigar11 (330) on Monday July 17 2017, @06:30AM (#540200) Homepage Journal

      I used pulseaudio once and I liked it. Otherwise I don't care as long as my default installation takes care of playing the damn music.

      Anywayyyyyy.... the reason I used pulseaudio was because I was working on a machine that didn't had any music playing apps and I didn't had root access nor the SuSE repository had required packages (this is back in 2006-2007). And I mean nothing! I mean, I fixed all the LD_PRELOAD and LD_LIBRARY_PATH and installed every single library source code with PREFIX=$HOME of 50MB and the carefully deleted all the unnecessary header files and libraries and proceeded to install mplayer, but mplayer at that time had a hard dependency on nasm (afair), and nasm you couldn't install without root access. So I got stuck. Fortunately, another machine on the other end of my desk had ample storage in /tmp as well as nasm, but it didn't have a speaker attached to it, it being a server and all (which is why I could rely on /tmp not being cleared every damn time the machine rebooted). Also, I wasn't allowed to do anything on that machine (why is too complicated).

      And I want to listen to music.

      Long story short, I installed mplayer in /tmp of the server, installed pulseaudio (also in /tmp), directed mplayer to use pulseaudio and directed pulseaudio to use MY machine's hardware. AFAIK pulseaudio was the only software that had that functionality (in Linux, that is. Windows had that for a long time).

      Good times, my friend.

      • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday July 17 2017, @09:03AM (1 child)

        by Wootery (2341) on Monday July 17 2017, @09:03AM (#540230)

        Was it burning up your CPU all that time?

        • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Monday July 17 2017, @11:41AM

          by cubancigar11 (330) on Monday July 17 2017, @11:41AM (#540259) Homepage Journal

          I don't remember. After around a month or so I bought my own laptop and that was the end of my adventures on other people's computer :D

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @11:11PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @11:11PM (#541220)

      Some people have more than one sound card (a common example being if you're using a TV as a monitor, as you end up with both the native sound card and the hdmi output), and may want some audio being played on one device while other audio is simultaneously playing on another device (say, so you can do your voice calls over your headset while playing music via the TV's output). To the best of my knowledge, this can only be done with pulseaudio or jack, and pulseaudio generally tends to be less painful to set up (TERRIBLY PACKAGED DEFAULTS notwithstanding...besides, these have mostly been fixed over the last few years).

      It's still not that pulseaudio is great in this situation, but it does occasionally show up as the lesser of available evils.

      • (Score: 2) by KiloByte on Thursday July 20 2017, @01:16AM (1 child)

        by KiloByte (375) on Thursday July 20 2017, @01:16AM (#541727)

        may want some audio being played on one device while other audio is simultaneously playing on another device (say, so you can do your voice calls over your headset while playing music via the TV's output). To the best of my knowledge, this can only be done with pulseaudio or jack

        I have music playing via speakers, while headphones are the default sound device that I use for voice calls, games and such. Both work at the same time with plain ALSA just fine -- what's your problem? In fact, it would be impossible for PulseAudio to support simultaneous sound had ALSA not allow it.

        --
        Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 23 2017, @04:00PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 23 2017, @04:00PM (#543383)

          Likely their "headphones" is a USB soundcard with headphones soldered directly to the audio pins.

          Thus whenever they plug in, Alsa has to deal with the appearance of a whole new sound device.

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday July 20 2017, @12:51AM

      by kaszz (4211) on Thursday July 20 2017, @12:51AM (#541714) Journal

      Do you have any suggestion for a setup where machine-A have a big nice screen connected but no sound. Machine-B have a small desktop screen and good sound output. So sometimes video in the webbrowser (html5) plays on machine-B and everything is alright because it got video+audio hardwired. Other times it would be desirable to play video in the webbrowser on machine-A but somehow.. redirect audio to machine-B to use sound output there.

      Alternatives thought of so far but not tested:
        (0) A USB-soundcard on each machine with digital mixing on the optical S/PDIF side. Either with a digital boolean OR mixer if it works or some selection dongle, but how to control it smoothly from the OS is a question.
        (1) USB-switch to one sound card which will make the default soundcard setting to be lost on every switch and have control issues.
        (2) PulseAudio.. Poettering.. network latency etc. And how does one direct the webbrowser to PulseAudio? even making it use ALSA is a pain. The webbrowser have no log or any debug console.

      Solution (0) feels tempting. But another one would be neat.

  • (Score: 2) by jasassin on Tuesday July 18 2017, @04:51AM

    by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Tuesday July 18 2017, @04:51AM (#540783) Homepage Journal

    To be Poettering free, one would also have to remove the dreaded pulseaudio system.

    Pulse audio really sucked some balls when it first came out, I'm curious what problems you are having with it now? I have no problems with it. It's actually cool that you can have multiple input streams so you can have sound notifications while watching a video etc. I honestly believe systemd will prove to be the same. In my opinion it's kind of a clusterfuck to have OSS, ALSA, JACK, PULSE etc., but I do appreciate some qualities of each. I have no reason to use JACK or ALSA because I don't do multi channel sound recording. Speaking of that, does pulse work well/at all for studio recording? Last I heard it didn't, but that was a long time ago.

    --
    jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A