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

On Fri, February 8, 2013 1:17 pm, shane richards wrote:
> 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).

I have to admit I have found my share of missing... and just wrong
.desktop files. The XDG opendesktop standard is a great idea, but the
number of audio programs that just have a category of "multimedia" is very
high. On an audio machine with lots of audio apps, the multimedia sub-menu
becomes unusable pretty quick. Of coarse now with things like Unity we are
supposed to go menu-less...

> 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.

As someone who has tested (sometimes new every day) ISO installs I have
seen things change from kernel to kernel. But that is not the whole thing.
There is a pile of services that run before the login screen appears and
another bunch that start after login as the DE comes up. I don't know how
many people that do kernel development care about low latency (there are
some), but when it comes to system services I think there are less. There
have been tests done on the same system with the same kernel version where
there were good results that vanished a week later when a system upgrade
changed something else in the system. This is a straight manpower issue.
It takes time and effort just to catch that something has changed. Just
testing that all the apps even start is hours of work, let alone testing a
set of workflows. A someone who helps assemble packages into a distro, I
would welcome help.

> 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.

I see ISOs in here:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/lucid/release/
I do not know if the repos still support it or not for adding other
software to it. The general method of upgrade I follow (and I am not
alone... probably linux is not alone in this either) is to buy a new hard
drive and keep the old one loaded till I have made sure I can work on any
projects that require that set of software. I am keeping one now just for
gcdmaster (gnome2 and gtk2 libs are no longer shipped). I understand in
your case that was not possible.

> 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?

Ouch! I would also find that less than amusing. I work with UbuntuStudio
and we purposely choose backgrounds that look nice but do not distract the
user from their work. We do ship plain XFCE as well and I see we will have
to make sure to at least look at what a login to an XFCE session looks
like... though so far they have been pretty plain. Thanks for the heads
up. As the main DEs are moving more towards a consumer oriented use
profile, they are getting harder to use for development or audio
production... At least I find it that way. The new DEs also seem to be
more cpu/memory intensive. (there are lots of people that like them too)

> 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.

I'll check for those. We were without KDE libs till the release we are
working on now. We added kdenlive and I notice nepomuk gets pulled in with
it. I had not noticed if it is running be default. Again, thanks for the
heads up.

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

I agree. The thing that I find frustrating is that QA is one place you do
not have know coding to help with. If each person just checked out one
workflow it would help... it may not get fixed (requires more people than
are around), but it may effect which packages are included... or get to
someone who does have time too. Things move slow, I have made changes over
a month ago where one package has been rebuilt, but the second package to
activate it has not. (I have waited longer for changes in the past)

It would be really nice if more users just documented their own workflow
for new users with comments of what additions might make it better.

-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net
_______________________________________________
Linux-audio-user mailing list
Linux-audio-user@email-addr-hidden
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user