Things have only gotten worse as Pango has killed off bitmap font support. We already had crisp, clean, sharp, beautiful fonts, and apparently that upset some people who have more power than they ought to. Back in 2014 everything was grand. You have to choose your terminal emulator and other programs carefully now.
It's insane that people get monitors so pixel dense you can't use them normally, and post-scaling you have equal or less usable space to the monitors of old, just to avoid blurry fonts that didn't even need to be used in the first place. Then people try to use circular logic to justify it all.
Consumer grade audio hardware has not gotten any more "nuanced" for several decades now. For the vast majority of use cases OSS was perfectly fine and it offered more than enough API to handle new features.
For the small minority of uses cases where you might have two sound cards and you may want to do some kind of sample accurate combined production between the two at very low latencies, sure, OSS was _somewhat_ inadequate.
So we ended up with a giant complicated audio stack where the boundaries between kernel space and user space are horribly blurred and create insane amounts of confusion and lost hours to benefit the 1% of users who might actually use those features.
I use Void Linux, and find it reasonably simple :) (the reason I like the distro essentially)
Nothing against complex things, if that's your thing though. (usually complex things are made to be 'easier'/more convenient to operate too, for some definition of easier)
There have been no cards that can do hardware mixing under production for more than 15 years. This is delusional.
Also, the cards that could do that back in the day were, audio quality speaking, shite.
If that's really what you consider "the best audio linux has ever", I think you don't know audio on linux very well.
I will grant you one thing: if you did have one of those cards, it certainly made multiple applications all playing (same sample rate) audio at the same time as easy as it could be. But that's all.
OsrsNeedsf2P|1 year ago
opan|1 year ago
Things have only gotten worse as Pango has killed off bitmap font support. We already had crisp, clean, sharp, beautiful fonts, and apparently that upset some people who have more power than they ought to. Back in 2014 everything was grand. You have to choose your terminal emulator and other programs carefully now.
It's insane that people get monitors so pixel dense you can't use them normally, and post-scaling you have equal or less usable space to the monitors of old, just to avoid blurry fonts that didn't even need to be used in the first place. Then people try to use circular logic to justify it all.
akira2501|1 year ago
For the small minority of uses cases where you might have two sound cards and you may want to do some kind of sample accurate combined production between the two at very low latencies, sure, OSS was _somewhat_ inadequate.
So we ended up with a giant complicated audio stack where the boundaries between kernel space and user space are horribly blurred and create insane amounts of confusion and lost hours to benefit the 1% of users who might actually use those features.
It was a complete mistake.
gnramires|1 year ago
Nothing against complex things, if that's your thing though. (usually complex things are made to be 'easier'/more convenient to operate too, for some definition of easier)
ssl-3|1 year ago
(Back in the OSS days, we tended to use the term "free software" or even "copyleft" more than we did "OSS" to describe software licensing.)
self_awareness|1 year ago
miffe|1 year ago
PaulDavisThe1st|1 year ago
Also, the cards that could do that back in the day were, audio quality speaking, shite.
If that's really what you consider "the best audio linux has ever", I think you don't know audio on linux very well.
I will grant you one thing: if you did have one of those cards, it certainly made multiple applications all playing (same sample rate) audio at the same time as easy as it could be. But that's all.