What Parts of Linux Audio Simply Work Great? (was Re: [linux-audio-dev] Best-performing Linux-friendly MIDI interfaces?)

[Lee Revell]

On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 11:50 -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
> > Also, he seems to be pissed because he bought one of the new "SBLives"
> > that uses the snd-ca0106 driver, and expects to get hardware mixing like
> > a real SBLive.  He's just an idiot, and his beef is with Creative, not
> > the ALSA people. 
> 
> jwz isn't an idiot, and he doesn't expect h/w mixing. he knows the
> difference between h/w and s/w mixing. his point is that from a desktop
> perspective, linux in 2005 ought to just provide [hs]/w mixing as
> required, with no intervention by the (desktop) user. he's not talking
> about musicians, or other "creative acoustic types". he's right.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, this is a distro problem.  We
all know it can be made to work, so it should be a simple matter of
automating the process.  Don't they test this stuff before they ship?

For example dmix has been available for quite some time, but no distro
enabled it by default, even though users clearly want it.  Now that ALSA
uses it by default, all of a sudden, all the distros use it by default,
and they're hyping it as some shiny new feature.  Aren't the distros
supposed to drive the adoption of new features, due to their proximity
to users?  We're in bad shape if all they do is wait for the developers
to respond to user needs.

This all tells me that the distro maintainers put a shockingly low
priority on having sound work OOTB, otherwise, why didn't they do this a
year ago?  AFAICT it's just laziness.

Lee