[LAU] So what do you think sucks about Linux audio ?

shane richards shanerich at email.com
Fri Feb 8 21:17:38 UTC 2013


I unfortunately had to download/code "new" versions of software recently due to burglary in what used to be a studio. This is what I found:

1. I never realised just how much time I had spent writing freaking .desktop files, designing icons, creating MIME types, associating programs, and mucking about with menus in general. Of course, where does one send their bunch of xdg files for others to use? It's not like packagers accept outsiders commenting on their sub-standard packaging. I have binaries installed right into /usr/share - how did that happen? I told the packager and was told basically where to go "NOOB". (30 years of CM production, 15 of those years on Linux. I'm a noob, ok, sorry).

2. What happened since 2010? About half my VST and windows programs stopped working. New wine sucks; lots of xruns, plenty of crashes, some programs won't even install or run. New kernel blows hard, I'm getting Xruns on a machine that's over 4-times as powerful as the last. Never, ever had that before. Why do we always have to have "cutting edge"? Screw the 1.5 release, the last good one was the 1.1.13/28/32, series. Use THAT tried and tested version for your install and allow upgrades later.

3. So far, NONE of my old multi-app projects have been immediately useable, due to the above. An OS upgrade has killed some projects. It shouldn't happen.
So I went searching for Ubuntu Lucid/KXStudio, just like I ran without incident for 3 years...it ran everything I could throw at it. There seems to have been an all-out scorched-earth policy towards Ubuntu Lucid. It no longer exists. KXStudio just wants to "upgrade" me - the original repos have been razed as well - but I don't want "upgrade", I want a wine that works and a kernel that can keep up on hardware that is 4 times faster than before.

4. And now to the biggest gripe. On my laptop, I decided to create a login for my partner so she could quickly check her mail without me having to unblock facebook etc. When I finally got her to log in, the DEFAULT BACKGROUND WALLPAPER HAD A HENTAI CHICK IN A SUBSERVIENCE POSE. WTF!? Partner not amused. Are all the distro people 15 year old losers?

5. Related to 4 and 1: can we just spend an hour checking the defaults on the desktop before releasing stuff? KDE as presented by the distros is worse than XP off a Dell ghost disk. Horrible, horrible, horrible defaults. Nepomuk/Strigi disaster turned on by default. Why? We already knew it was a disaster. If you're gonna say "we're a music distro", then set it up for MUSIC not for eye-candy.


So basically, there's a whole layer missing between distro and public. Q&A

- shane


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