[mjg59]

Nonsense - HDA systems were overwhelmingly the majority of Linux systems at that point, and didn't have any hardware support for multiple streams. OSS with software mixing was a commercial product that wasn't upstream. ALSA had userspace mixing but it was very much not an out of the box experience, and didn't take advantage of hardware capabilities in the way Pulseaudio did to reduce wakeups and power consumption.

[anthk]

ALSA had DMIX by default, all that before Pulseaudio. I remember Knoppix and a few more doing that.

[mjg59]

DMIX was typically not an out of the box default, and had multiple shortcomings.

[hedora]

Even so, surely it would have been easier and better to just fix or replace dmix (in kernel, in the existing data path) than introduce a userspace daemon, break API compatibility, and so on.

It’s been 20 years and pulseaudio is still flaky / high latency / incomprehensible. Professional flows that care use stuff like jack.

[anthk]

TBH pipewire works much better than pulse, up to the point to replacing jack itself. But DMIX worked fine for non-professional user needs and with very low CPU usage. Yes, it was Jackd for the professional but Windows had ASIO drivers too.

[account42]

Pipe might work better than pulse but it's still an overcomplicated mess compared to ALSA, which is itself an overcomplicated mess compared to OSS, which could have been easily made to support concurrent clients to /dev/dsp without all the API breakages and flaky deamons we had to suffer through.

[mjg59]

Doing audio mixing well is something that is, for a number of reasons, hard to do in kernel. And if you're still using pulseaudio, why? The rest of the world's moved to pipewire, which also provides a jack-compatible interface.

[loeg]

> It’s been 20 years and pulseaudio

PipeWire replaced Pulse like five years ago; who is using Pulse at this point to make statements like "20 years" meaningful? It isn't really an ongoing concern.

[bzzzt]

Pulseaudio came with an ALSA plugin which meant applications written for the ALSA API could output to PA so it was compatible.

[anthk]

It was on tons user oriented distros.

[mjg59]

This is the era where I was the lead on Ubuntu laptop support, and I promise you that dmix was not a trivial option to make things work out of the box.

[anthk]

I always had some Knoppix live CD/DVD which had better defaults than Ubuntu itself on hardware autodetection and setup. I think they used kudzu from RH for a good while plus custom patches.

Bear in mind the Knoppix creator had a blind wife, up to the point to creating A.R.I.A.N.E, one of the best distros for the blind (and it was merged with main KNOPPIX, making the distro one of the best accesible ones out there). Thus, proper audio mixing was mandatory.

With the bundled installer you could install it to as a Debian Testing install in the spot. As I didn't have internet at home, I remember using Knoppix before Debian Sarge because it had a huge amount of things to play and test without worrying about odd hardware setups.

[mjg59]

Some of the context here is that that at the time, Ubuntu was aiming to work on as close to 100% of existing PCs as possible to make it available to the largest number of users. Knoppix had a lot of great features and also was very opinionated, and that had an influence on the set of hardware it worked well on by default. I evaluated basically every decision made there in terms of whether Ubuntu should adopt the same ones, and there were several that were just not good choices in terms of supporting the widest set of hardware possible.

[account42]

Bullshit.

[iknowstuff]

Do you think starting with "Nonsense" makes your argument better heard?