[kloud]

+1 I think such writing would find its audience.

What I would like to see is something that is to systemd what PipeWire is to PulseAudio.

Before PulseAudio getting audio to work properly was a struggle. PA introduced useful abstractions, but when it was rolled out it was a buggy mess. Eventually it got good over time. Then PipeWire comes in, and it does more with less. The transition was so smooth, I did not even realize it I had been running it for a while, just one day I noticed it in the update logs.

systemd now works well enough, but it would be nice to get rid of that accumulated cruft.

[dizhn]

systemd and pulseaudio are by the same guy (avahi too). He just writes shit software that sort of works.

[kloud]

Also he has no regards for breaking userspace to the point of needing to get scolded by Linus. But some ideas are good and there is a lot of pioneering work that moves the needle. The trajectories of PulseAudio and systemd are similar, it just needs cleaning up. PulseAudio got fixed up by PipeWire, whereas systemd is at the point of lifecycle yet to reach that stage.

[AnonymousPlanet]

There's a podcast [1], which features him as a guest to talk about Linux in general. The main impressions I got from it: he is very confused about what UNIX is and he apparently despises UNIX.

I think he's well suited for his new employer (Microsoft).

[1] (in German) https://cre.fm/cre209-das-linux-system

[majewsky]

The reason that PulseAudio did not work at first (and PipeWire worked out of the gate), is that PulseAudio and PipeWire use a lot of relatively newer kernel audio APIs that previous sound daemons did not use. Therefore driver implementations of those APIs were untested and hence buggy when PulseAudio first started using them.

When people say "PulseAudio is not a broken mess anymore", what they really mean is "my audio driver is not a broken mess anymore".