[mcpackieh]

> arouse the anger of a small but very vocal crowd who really can't stand any challenge to the status quo.

This sort of narrative is common cope from developers who make substandard software. Ego blinds them to their own limitations so they blame the users. Just look at the difference between Pulseaudio and Pipewire. Pulseaudio is widely hated and the developers said it's because people just hate new things. But Pipewire is newer and people love it, the supposed reflexive hate for new things doesn't manifest for Pipewire. So what's the difference? Pipewire does what it's meant to and doesn't cause problems for people. Pulseaudio caused endless grief, that's why people hated it. SystemD earned ire by causing people problems; had it not done that most users never would have realized they were using it in the first place.

[kaba0]

While Pipewire is certainly better than Pulseaudio, let’s not forget that the latter actually surfaced the millions of bugs in sound drivers by simply using them in a more advanced way than just putting out audio, so while it was buggy initially, most of those stem from a layer below.

[mcpackieh]

Pulseaudio is buggy to this day, and switching to Pipewire is most often the easiest way to fix problems with audio, particularly bluetooth audio. They're both meant to do the same thing, but using the same exact drivers Pipewire just works better. This is why all the major distros are switching to Pipewire; a transition which hasn't earned the ire of the users who are supposedly mad at anything new.