Linus Torvalds schools Lennart Poettering on the importance of users

38 comments

Unfortunate title, but it's a good video and some good thoughts from both Linus and AC.
Interestingly, this video is just 2 years after Linus and Alan Cox had a bit of a blowup that caused AC to resign from the TTY subsystem. And even more interestingly, the blowup was specifically about the very topic they're discussing: not breaking userspace and keeping a consistent user experience. Linus felt AC had broken userspace unnecessarily, was too proud/stubborn to revert the change and save the user experience. AC felt Linus was trivializing how easy "just fix it" was going to be and threw up his hands and resigned.
I was curious if they were still on good terms after that, and it's nice to see that they were. For newcomers to Linux, Alan Cox used to be (in the 1990s) the undisputed Riker to Linus' Picard, the #2 in command, ready to take over all of Linux at a moment's notice. As we got into the 2000s, that changed, and this video (2011) was from the middle of a chaotic time for him. In 2009 he quit Red Hat, then joined Intel 2 years later, then quit shortly after that and has just a few years ago stopped kernel development permanently.
- Should probably also mention that his wife, Telsa Gwynne, was diagnosed with cancer around the time he retired and she sadly passed away in 2015.

This is Tron.
Tron fights for the users.
Be like Tron.

Lennart has always been a joke. Forced systems on us and wrote the disaster of pulseaudio.
- Both pulseaudio and systemd brought significant improvements to the Linux ecosystem.
  
  After being a pile of crap forced on us by a corporate giant for many many years. Make no mistake, they are doing embrace extend extinguish just like Microsoft.
- I use Pipewire now but Pulseaudio is (and has been for years) better than both the Windows and Mac audio stack. It may have been bad once (yes, I remember the days of having to start Wine with some pulse env var so the audio doesn't crackle) but nowadays it doesn't deserve the level of hate it still gets.
  
  Wasn't Red hat also responsible for Pipewire and Wayland?
  I love to hate them for what they did recently, but those two projects kick major ass.
  
  It would have been fine if it wasn't forced. "We are the audio stack everyone should use" but when it doesn't work then it's an ALSA bug and alsa ppl should take the blame (even when it works fine with full alsa, like my audio card). And it was designed more like a networking stack then an audio stack.
  Sure it was necessary at the time (so that hdmi, and later bluetooth, would work transparently), but the "i know best" attitude hurt its execution.
  SystemD on the other hand brought nothing of value. Did way more harm then good.
- ALSA wasn't going to take the Linux desktop anywhere
  
  Everything audio needs Alsa including Pipewire.
  
  PulseAudio sits on top of ALSA, so that isn't entirely true. ALSA alone isn't a modern audio stack, but it is part of one.
- i dont get why youre being downvoted.i m with you.
  
  Linux community is so inherently meritocratic that one can't meaninfully force anything upon any large group of them.
  Thore particular two creations of Lennart took the world by storm precisely because they were so absurdly good that working on other stuff was a dead-end, obvious for all but such tiny fraction of people that even forming vacuous hate bubbles haven't rallied enough effort to foster and maintain alternatives.
  It became trendy to hate Pulseaudio and call it bloat years after Nokia shipped a rather anemic phone where it already worked flawlessly. I need no further proof that there's no technical basis beneath the hate.

38 comments