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posted by LaminatorX on Monday September 01 2014, @09:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the puttering-about dept.

Phoronix has an article up about some interesting ideas of Lennart Poettering about what could be a possible future for Linux:

Lennart Poettering of systemd and PulseAudio fame has published a lengthy blog post that shares his vision for how he wishes to change how Linux software systems are put together to address a wide variety of issues. The Btrfs file-system and systemd play big roles with his new vision. Long story short, Lennart is trying to tackle how Linux distributions and software systems themselves are assembled to improve security, deal with the challenges of upstream software vendors integrating into many different distributions, and "the classic Linux distribution scheme is frequently not what end users want."

 
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  • (Score: 1) by pyg on Tuesday September 02 2014, @01:42AM

    by pyg (4381) on Tuesday September 02 2014, @01:42AM (#88317)

    Yeah, prior to this I didn't realize he was responsible for PulseAudio (aka the reason sound doesn't work right until 'apt-get remove pulseaudio'). I have no judgments yet about systemd but I'm already there with infamy.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by cykros on Tuesday September 02 2014, @08:03PM

    by cykros (989) on Tuesday September 02 2014, @08:03PM (#88622)

    In all fairness, Pulseaudio does some things that ALSA can't, such as outputting separate streams to separate sound cards simultaneously. This is why I went out of my way to install it on my Slackware system (which doesn't ship with it by default), and having gotten it without any upstream mangling or stupid default configurations, I can't say I have big complaints about its mere existence.

    That it's being included by default despite most computers using only one sound card, adding unnecessary complexity and ensuring vast numbers of users won't have sound working right off the bat, however, is one of the most regrettable things I've seen happen in the Linux world (at least up until systemd). Pulseaudio should be like Jack; installed by users who need the added functionality, and otherwise left out for those who don't and/or don't care to bother with the added complexity. That software is being released now RELYING on pulseaudio unnecessarily (Here's looking at you Skype) is just beyond rationality. Maybe there's something I'm missing about what skype does (I'd peruse the source code, but then, it's not available), but it seems a little odd that other similar programs seem to make do just fine without pulseaudio (including Tox, which we've currently got a story up on here on SN).

    Systemd, otoh, I can't see much reason to add in, and meanwhile, from what I understand, isn't really something you can add into an otherwise already set up system (without essentially ripping it down to replace sysvinit). It's mere existence is a blight upon the species; a reminder of the vast ocean of stupidity we're host to. Hopefully AV software will start flagging Linux ISO's that install it as the malware that they are.