Linux sucks.

Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:

1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.

2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.

3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?

4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).

5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!

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Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.

I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.

But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.

I received a shiny new pair of Bose QC 35 II's for christmas -- bluetooth headphones with active noise cancelling.

They're similar to the $500 pair my previous boss lent me at work. Lower quality, but much newer, and rechargeable! and bluetooth! Yay!

I paired them with my debian machine, and... it failed. No explanation given. I tried everything I could htink of, but nothing changed. Well, okay; bluetooth came out within the last decade or so, meaning it takes some extra effort in Debian. truth. So I did some reading on bluetooth connection issues, changed some configs, learned how to use the bluetooth cli, and used that to pair and connect them. Worked like a charm.

But! No audio.
Damn.

Cue more research (on pulseaudio this time) and more configs. Did some fiddling, etc. No progress. Also discovered `pavucontrol`, a gui-only (😕) utility which lets you select audio output devices, among other things. It doesn't list the headset. Nor does `pactl list`, but that does list the correct bluetooth modules. It also lists Lennart Poettering's name many many times, for all the good that does. Bragging about building something as needlessly complicated and crappy and buggy as pulseaudio? I will never understand that egotistical doucheballoon.

Anyway.
I paired the headset with my phone in about six seconds. I'm now controlling my phone's music via spotify on my computer. yay. Doesn't work for games or movies, but I can always just plug them in.

But woo!
Noise canceling!
Yay, silence! At last!
and music! How I've missed you!
❤💜🖤

(systemd and pulseaudio can still die in a fire.)

What I was supposed to do today:

Finish up some homework and code for a bit

What I actually did today:

1. Boot up my laptop to get started on homework

2. Open Spotify and try to connect my headphones

3. Reinstall Bluetooth and pulseaudio to connect to headphones

4. Connected! But the sound quality is shit

5. Spend an hour or so learning about codec sinks and how Bluetooth is the definition of an overengineered clusterfuck

6. Install some package from the aur to get AAC codec support

7. Now we have high fidelity audio, but the headphones still connect to the crappy SBC sink, so I spend another 45 minutes writing a shell script to automatically switch to the AAC sink when a Bluetooth headset connects

8. It’s finally working! But now I have no motivation to do my actual work. Fml

For god fucking sake, PulseAudio, write a usable fucking documentation for your library and remove idiotic silent exit(1) calls and properly log what the fucking issue was

I'm tired of debugging this piece of bull shit for over a month now already while the pulse library occasionally crashes for no apparent reason

I just installed Opera Mini on my PSP. That alone isn't very exciting on its own, although I am stoked that my website does in fact render on a device from 2009. With the helpful guidance of a laptop from 2004 that's doing the hotspot duties for this thing.

No, what really got me stoked is that Opera still supports these old platforms, and how small they managed to make it. The .jar file for Opera Mini 4.5 is ~800kB large. There's a .jad file as well but it's negligible in size and seems to be a signature of sorts.

Let that sink in for a moment. This entire web browser is 800kB. Firefox meanwhile consistently consumes 800 MEGABYTES.. in MEMORY. So then, I went to think for a moment, how on earth did they manage to cram an entire functioning web browser in 800kB? Hell, what makes up a web browser anyway?

The answer to that question I got to is as follows. You need an engine to render the web page you receive. You need a UI to make the browser look nice. And finally you need a certificate store to know which TLS certificates to trust. And while probably difficult to make, I think it should be possible to do in 800k. Seriously, think about it. How would you go *make* a web browser? Because I've already done that in the past.

Earlier I heard that you need graphics, audio, wasm, yada yada backends too.. no. Give your head a shake. Graphics are the responsibility of the graphics driver. A web browser shouldn't dabble with those at all. Audio, you connect to PulseAudio (in Linux at least) and you're done. Hell I don't even care about ALSA or OSS here. You just connect to the stuff that does that job for you. And WebAssembly.. God I could rant about that shit all day. How about making it a native application? Not like actual Assembly is used for BIOS and low-level drivers. And that we already have a better language for the more portable stuff called C.

Seriously, think about it. Opera - a reputable browser vendor - managed to do it in 800kB on a 12 year old device. Don't go full wank on your framework shit on the comments. And don't you fucking dare to tell me that there's more to it. They did it for crying out loud. Now you take a look at your shitpile for JS code and refactor that shit already. Thank you.

The Linux sound system scene looks like it was deliberately designed to be useless.

ALSA sees all my inputs and outputs, but it can't be used to learn (or control) anything about software and where their sound goes. Plus it's near impossible to identify inputs and outputs.

PulseAudio does all sorts of things automatically, but it's hard to configure and has high latency.

JACK is very convenient to configure, has great command line tools (like you'd expect from Linux), is scriptable, but it doesn't see things.

Generally, all of these see the others as a single output and a single input, which none of them are.

This is the funniest fucking IT meme I’ve ever seen. It’s on par with that meme where anon gets hired to Pulseaudio, and the whole dialog is just empty speech bubbles

Just when I was about to watch the Downton Abbey clips on YouTube I realize that my Firefox went completely silent without warning.

So the latest Firefox 52.0 decided to drop ALSA and force users to use pulseaudio instead. Otherwise the only way is to recompile the source with the alsa option enabled, or downgrade.

What the actual fuck Mozilla? Who made this decision? What's the reason behind? So far Firefox is the only browser that is having the sound problem.

Nope. not another bloated package. Maybe I should switch over to Chrome.

So, unlike normal people who just click on an mp3 file in windows explorer, I'm listening to music saved on my windows hard drive, accessed via an sshfs mount, using VLC running inside a HyperV linux VM and Xming/pulseaudio to make it show up inside windows like a normal window and play sound.
Why? Because this is my replacement for WSL which broke (Good Job on the updates as always, M$) and I'm celebrating that I got everything* to work.

* Nevermind the hours I wasted because I forgot to add a rule to the windows firewall allowing pulseaudio to connect and the fact that Xming can't handle vlc playing video

So Yay just asked me to replace pulseaudio with pipewire. I was hesitant because I have meetings to attend and I don't want to have to fuck around with my audio config once again.
But it simply works.
PipeWire can replace pulseaudio simply by uninstalling pulse and installing pipewire-pulse.
Next I'll see if it can replace JACK as easily. If so, if I no longer have to juggle two fundamentally incompatible audio servers to do audio processing, then FOSS has just solved one of the greatest obstacles in its path to reach feature parity and performance superiority to Windows.

I've been asking myself this question for a while lately.

Can I combine the music coming out of my phone with the sound from games on my PC?

"Why?", you ask.

Because I want it!

So I started reading man pages and documentation about ALSA and PA. A couple of hours later it just works. I don't know how or why, but I did it, all by myself, because no one does such weird stuff.

I'm way too excited about this.

What the f*ck Microsoft, you made me go trough whole shitton of troubles just to play a music into microphone so I can play music in VRChat while pulseaudio in Linux can redirect the audio without any hassle. You total piece of shit!

There's something to be said about building Linux from a blank slate. It takes longer to get a complete system but you know how to fix issues when they come up.

I coudln't get my bluetooth headset working for the life of me until I found out the headset needed the PulseAudio daemon which I had removed because I liked AlsaMixer better. Well, I decided to give PulseAudio a try again and after spending about 10 minutes with the config I got my bluetooth headset working again!

After using Linux for 3 months I've learned there's only so much hand holding it will do before you have to make your own fuckups and figure things out. You can't have freedom over your system if you aren't willing to solve problems, doesn't matter what type of technology it is.

Here, a full retrospective of my Apple products ownership.

iPhone SE – after Android, I was absolutely amazed by how fast it worked. No UI lags, camera works absolutely instantly no matter the light conditions, all the GPU-heavy games work butter smooth.

After camera and charging port failures on Xperia flagship and CPU literally melting through screen rendering it unusable on Meizu, it was enough to make me interested in Apple products.

When I was using Meizu, I actually got a twitching eye which was triggered by UI lags. After two months of using iPhone, I noticed that something was missing – my eye wasn't twitching anymore.

iPhone actually cured me.

MacBook 12 – a 900 grams laptop with passive-cooled mobile CPU running many Chrome tabs, heavy Webpack HMR build, VSCode and Slack just fine. Yes, you can't play games, but I don't even require it from a laptop this tiny.

Butterfly keyboard that internet hates so much actually increased my typing speed and comfort compared to MX Red mechanical keyboard, and ForceTouch trackpad made me forget about mouse. I learned how to disassemble the Butterfly keyboard if I ever need this but the keyboard never failed.

I use this laptop to this day and it still even smells like the day one, a beautiful smell of a new Apple product.

iPhone X – got it because of the camera, stayed for great battery life and amazing OLED display. I use telephoto lens exclusively and it made me lay off my Canon DSLR with Helios lens which stays on my bookshelf covered in dust to this day.

True black of OLED display which is undistinguishable from the screen bezel is stunning. To this day, battery surely works for one and a half days and I watch youtube really often.

I sometimes struggled to unlock iPhone SE with wet fingers, but with FaceID, as soon as I look at the screen the phone is unlocked. Works perfect every time, never had an issue with this.

Stainless steel body feels premium compared to aluminum. Stereo sound is a major selling point if you're like watching videos and playing games on your phone. Overall amazing product and a huge improvement over SE.

Apple Watch series 4 – really comfortable fit. Nice battery life, once I forgot about it for like ten days during lockdown and it was still working, even though on power reserve mode. Really reliable in terms of battery life and liquid protection. Very satisfying Taptic Engine crown clicks. I run every day and Apple watch always measure my heart rate correctly, and the running app is well designed and a pleasure to use. Overall a nice accessory to have if you use iPhone.

Powerbeats Pro – great sound and battery life. I switched from Shure SE215 which was great, but it had wires. I listen to a lot of music so the sound quality is important for me. When I was choosing earphones I visited a store where you can listen to them all. I listened through earphones like Noble Audio Kaiser Encore and JH Audio Layla, and of course $4000 Laylas sound better than $249 bluetooth earphones, but the difference in sound doesn't justify the difference in price to me.

Powerbeats pro is the Apple H1 chip true wireless earphones with largest driver of them all which makes them sound better than AirPods Pro – it's just physics. Bass in Powerbeats is amazing, which is also true for my Shures, but Powerbeats also win in clarity.

It connects seamlessly to both my MacBook and my iPhone, and everyone in voice chats can hear me really good.

Huge case is a major throwback compared to AirPods, but the battery life of earphones themselves is so great that I just leave the case at home and only carry earphones and it works for me.

Apple Link bracelet in space black – really better than I expected. Intricate detailing, literally the steel that Rolex uses, top-notch finishing and polishing – all that for just 450 dollars. I only used it for several days now, but it already feels like a really satisfying product.

Before all that I was using Linux. It took a year for elementaryos devs to fix wifi for my laptop. Ubuntu looks and feels ugly. Pop OS felt like garbage. Manjaro was also just that – garbage. KDE Plasma – I don't even want to talk about that. A monstrocity where you accidentally click a wrong switch in the settings and your system won't boot up again. Also, PulseAudio. Struggles with proprietary drivers and software updates.

Windows? I serviced a lot of Windows PCs through my career and it never, never worked as intended. I'm no dumbass, I always managed the rights correctly and never installed sketchy apps. My latest ryzen gaming build with a lot of ram also lags somehow even in Windows 10 UI.

Before I switched, I defended Linux.

My life was a lie.

I'm sorry to everyone who I offended based on their opinion on Linux.

I don't understand pulseaudio. Should I use JACK? Does every application support JACK?

Can I have one Ubuntu base update after which I *do not* need to go to recovery mode to reinstall Nvidia drivers, and then CPR pulseaudio into function?

Spend half a day trying to make sound work on my antergos install, after multiple image builds, kernel jumping, reinstalling alsa, realized that people working on making cherry trail laptops sound work - stopped working on it since like april 2017 and new kernels have simply no patch to make it work, great.. debian docs mention that you should be able to use an external soundcard atleast, but the whole alsa and pulseaudio shit doesn't make that easy at all.. atleast the battery time with arch+powertop+tlp is almost the same as what I would get with windows out of it

!Rant and i also might be late to the party. But i love pipewire. I tried it out yesterday, installation was straightforward and it just works.

(let's see how long it takes, until i go back to pulseaudio though)

Gonna shoot pulseaudio in the balls someday soon.

I was having issues with PulseAudio on Ubuntu not working properly and spent about 40 minutes trying to modify various config files to fix the problem. Eventually, I fuck my system up so bad that there is no audio at all and PulseAudio refuses to even start. So I revert all of the config files to their original state and try starting PulseAudio, it still refuses even start. Then I try rebooting the system, and not only does PulseAudio work when I log back in but my original issues were gone even though I reverted all of the configs. Computers. How do they work? Nobody knows. But at least now I can listen to my music in peace.

I'll just configure Pulseaudio, bindfs and MediaTomb while that movie is download... Stupid Popcorn Time and stupid buffering

Does anyone have any ideas on how to decrease latency of audio multicast via pulseaudio?

Currently having a non uniform latency of 1-10 seconds

This is in case of local network