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Cynically, I'd say it breaks because the only mistakes that we live with, try to work around or fix are the ones made no later than the mid-90s. Everything else, we live with for a while, then boldly proclaim that they're outdated, junk from another age, no longer appropriate for a modern system and then promptly rewrite -- so unsurprisingly, a lot of components of a major Linux desktop are basically beta-quality and/or in a continuous state of flux. Look at the Gnome 3.22 changelog. It lists things like support for multiple renaming, being able to set alarms for events in Calendar and seamless photo sharing via Google Photos and email. I remember being excited about all these features (except Google Photos, for obvious reasons) when I was using Windows. 2000. I was using Windows 2000. That's why we're rejoicing that we'll soon have ASLR in all mainstream distros and support for a display server/compositor where windows can't snoop on other windows is just around the corner, while Microsoft is perfecting call-flow integrity and has had a proper compositor since the days when we were barely able to bolt our applications on top of an X11 compositor. Edit: Non-cynically: most of the breakage happens because the level of complexity involved in a most modern technologies is way over the level that can be meaningfully managed by a community. systemd, xdg-everything, they're all very useful tools, but only a handful of people can properly use them, and it doesn't help that so many of them work for Red Hat and aren't exactly transparent about a lot of things. This breeds mistrust and brings about a lot of unjustified criticism along with the justified one. As for why PulseAudio in particular keeps breaking, I'm not familiar enough with its source code to say. My problems revolve around things like randomly deciding to use another output device. I work around it by not using it, really. Every couple of months I take KDE and Gnome for a ride, they keep breaking, I open up the page of my local Apple dealer, I gaze incredulously at how much money they want for that hardware, close the page, pacman -Rcs plasma-meta and get back to WindowMaker. |