[linux-audio-dev] New powermacs?

[Ivica Bukvic]

> If you really believe a GNU/Linux system if a better choice because of
its
> open architecture, then hack some user-friendly tools, or ask someone
> else to do it.

I am. Check my website. But I am also running out of steam (or maybe I
am simply exhausted by the end-of-school-year syndrome, so everything
appears to be grim to me :-), so to speak. I feel as if my efforts are
on a larger scale practically pointless simply because the community is
so fragmented that we have tons of redundant apps (see sound servers for
example), out of which many of them are incomplete, other that work
great do not have widespread use and/or purpose, and others are simply
inefficient. For instance, I would love to see KDE drop the ugly artsd
and use either Jackd or alsa's dmix plugin, but that is not going to
happen because they believe that artsd is better (for whatever odd
reason). Now for me to hack KDE to use jackd is simply too daunting a
task (if not impossible), and yet to convince KDE developers to take
that path has been tried in the past and has yielded even less promising
results than the first option.

If, only if we could do this small step of setting the platform-wide
standards (and here I do not speak only in terms of audio), we would
have OSX unified framework in Linux where it would make sense to make
user-friendly tools that sit on top of that framework (regardless of its
continuous development -- at least we would have one framework to deal
with). As it is now, there is no sense of doing so when the underlying
frameworks continuously change and/or compete making any kind of such
tool obsolete overnight. At best one could keep on wasting time updating
the user-friendly tool to keep up with the underlying changes, but that
would detract efforts of many from bettering what is most important now
-- a unified and powerful underlying framework. Yet, that is not what
we're working on right now...

Oh well, never mind. I am rambling away... Maybe I am simply
impatient... I'll try to get some R&R this summer, then maybe my outlook
on the whole enchilada will not look so grim :-)...

Regards,

Ico