[hamandcheese]

> > We’ve reached a point where an update to macOS — or to any app I rely on, really — is a source of dread rather than excitement. I now expect the new version to be worse.

You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS.

Proprietary software isn't built for users anymore. But (some) FOSS still is.

[zem]

> You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS.

speak for your clearly non-pulseaudio-using self (:

[mort96]

Pulseaudio has been painless for like a decade and a half. Yes, it has a rough start and was probably made default in many distros before it ought to, but it's fine.

[greatgib]

Pulse audio is ok until you plug or unplug things like earpieces and bluetooth speakers and then you want to do a videocall and random devices are the active ones. And then you find no obvious way to be able to record both input and output...

[unknownfuture]

Lol because that never happens on any other OS. Plug my Mac into my dock, uses my DAC. Great. Unplug. Connect Bluetooth headphones. So far so good. Plug back into dock. Now it's... the built in audio? Huh?

I'm honestly surprised how often in Linux PA with WirePlumber just does the right thing most times, IME.

[zx8080]

MacOS is the worst. I got to reconnect my bose bluetooth headset 3-4 times every time I have a zoom call because no sound.

On contrast, my linux laptop does not have any issue with the same headset and it gets connected instantly.

[windexh8er]

This is my Monday morning dance of Bluetooth. 99% of the time I'll join a call and everything is connected, line levels are set and yet... No audio. I know people complain about Pulse but MacOS is just as bad and, seemingly, getting worse.

I'll take a Linux distro any day of the week.

[manquer]

Perhaps the parent poster user AirPods. Those in contrast would seamlessly switch between your iPhone and MacBook . Apple more or less by planned design nowadays work seamlessly with their own products and their support for other devices is patchy .

[greatgib]

Obviously Mac is terrible, as a Linux user I would clearly not use it as a baseline of how it should work.

[mort96]

The point is it's a difficult problem which nobody has solved perfectly. ALSA was certainly not better.

[leni536]

Use pipewire and its pulseaudio facade.

[Chu4eeno]

Last I tried that (because everyone claimed it was magically better at everything) sound just randomly broke (I had no idea why, debugging pipewire is a nightmare), and since I switched back to pulseaudio everything just works again (and seems to use less CPU, but that could be selective memory).

Maybe I'm just old and grumpy, but we spent decades hammering out all the incorrect (for pulseaudio) assumptions in every layer of the stack and papered over impedance mismatches, and then people decide to rewrite from scratch again (though I'll admit I was a vocal pro-dmix anti-pulseaudio hater for a long time).

[leni536]

I have the opposite experience, in particular with bluetooth audio. YMMV

[marcosdumay]

Good thing that Debian pushed that thing into "non-core compatibility tools" status. It and NVidia drivers were always the things that made upgrading risky.

Relatedly, systemd stopped breaking a while ago. Either distros stopped keeping it up-to-date or people can learn.

[murderfs]

And also clearly not a GNOME user...

[overfeed]

It's no coincidence that PulseAudio and Gnome are Pottering-authored/Pottering-adjacent software.

[readread]

Anything with the Red Hat stink, these days. Which, yeah, a lot of that’s Poettering.

If they haven’t been executing a plan to make it extremely painful to maintain a distro that differs significantly from whatever Red Hat’s preferences and ways of operating are (so, making it harder to justify anything but “screw it, we’ll just use red hat, everyone else is just the same thing but with less ability to steer the direction of the OS”), damn the effects on UX, the traditional modular nature of Linux systems, and general open source ecosystem health… well, they’ve sure done a great job of it, so it’d be pretty crazy if that isn’t what they’ve been doing.

[ajnin]

Latest venture of the ilk behind all that : device attestation for Linux (Amutable). Yes, they clearly have an agenda and are being quite successful at pushing it.

[account42]

Also Wayland with its mobile OS restrictions model that is entirely inappropriate for a free software desktop.

[account42]

Or a KDE user...

For some reason they just can't help themselves from "improving" the themes that people are already using instead of creating new ones that people can choose if they want extra white space or whatever is hip now.

[altruios]

pulse audio's pain points were in setup for me, and in setup alone. using it has been a breeze.

[zem]

an update last year broke some laptop microphone settings that in 30 years of using linux I had had no reason to even know existed. took me literally a couple of weeks to figure out what was going on and fix it. it was admittedly the first time in many years that it broke anything, but when it did it did so in style.

[vitally3643]

I felt like I got slapped in the face when I updated Audacity to see a goddamn cloud login service for the audio equivalent of Notepad.

[Tanoc]

Tenacity was developed because of that one Tantacrul video where he accidentally revealed that Audacity was going to start telemetry. Audacity tried to claim it was just basic stuff like OS version and hardware, then realized that people were still angry and decided to just push as far as they could. That video was like their turning point. The fact that even Audacity could fall to that showed a lot of people that even the basic stuff nobody ever thinks about can turn into something imposing and hostile.

[behnamoh]

> You know what software doesn't fill me with dread to update? FOSS.

As someone who's been burnt several times with CachyOS (Arch) updates, I don't think this is true.

[bhaak]

Arch is bleeding edge. Breakage is expected there. It breaks so others can be stable.

Thank you for your service.

[Gigachad]

So many Linux user problems are self inflicted. It’s almost a demonstration why proprietary platforms limit your options so much when users choose to shove a stick in their bike spokes and complain it let them do that.

[behnamoh]

Nope, we're talking about updates to the OS, not users messing around and shoving a stick in their bike spokes.

[voakbasda]

Choose a niche distro, deal with niche update issues.

[j16sdiz]

Choose a major distro, deal with poettering non-sense.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Using Cachy since about two years now. Never had any stress with it. Maybe it's about the random combination of components, hardware, driver/firmware quality? If you've got a bad combo, it will always crap out at some point in time. But so do others, too. Just on different combinations.

[unsungNovelty]

Arch is not "bleeding edge" . It's latest stable version of packages/software.

[ludston]

The fact that Arch is bleeding edge has been an explicit part of the Arch philosophy for as long as I've been using it (for 20 years now). It breaks a lot less frequently than it used to.

[unsungNovelty]

I personally think the whole bleeding edge argument is funny. Imagine me telling macOS27 is bleeding edge. Or any stable version of software u use is bleeding edge and that we should wait 6 months before using it.

Arch reflects the state of linux. I will never say it's perfect. But rolling releases give u the latest stable version of software. Like I said, I've found arch to be easier to fix. I've been burned too many times cos of Ubuntu and the lots.

[ragall]

Upstream developers declaring a release as "stable" isn't sufficient to make it so. Distros and users are the ones who decide what is stable and what isn't.

[MrDrMcCoy]

Trouble is, there's an enormous gap between when maintainers accept that a package as stable and when it actually makes it into the next release. I'd be plenty happy waiting an extra month or two for a stable release, but am not thrilled with waiting a year or more for one.

[ragall]

I used to think that way when I was young and with plenty of free time. Nowadays I want stability more than anything else and I'm fine with software that's 1 year old. The only problem still present is how to buy a new laptop and have everything work from the beginning.

[unsungNovelty]

I've had more problems in point releases in my last 15years of using Linux. The problem and issues usually happen because of the said holding off of outdated software. If it's desktop computing, Arch (or rolling releases) are the best option. Arch, when it breaks, it's also the easiest to fix. I'll agree with you if it's about server side of things.

I wrote a lil about it all here: https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/01/2024/a-linux-distro-r...

[Chu4eeno]

Arch actually has testing repos (and has had for as long as I can remember), plus other project-specific testing repos like kde-unstable when upstream is taking a very long time to push out a new actually stable release. It also has lts packages for projects that offer those (like the kernel), and sometimes stays on old versions and backports fixes if the upstream definition of stable is too out of whack.

People seem to believe arch is much more yolo than it actually is (though forks of arch have tended to be pretty yolo, and I assume cachyos is a bit yolo as well based on the issues people have).

[QwenGlazer9000]

Arch users are basically beta testers. Near same day updates with upstream.

[amrit3128]

Exactly, though it's mostly community software and not corporate backed oss. Zig has been taking an interesting direction, emacs is still getting features after 50 years, ladybird is turing out nice, and a ton of other things

[Citizen_Lame]

Richard Stallman was right all along.

[daemin]

Ubuntu is still annoying with it's daily popups asking to update the system and then most times requiring a system restart. In some ways it is worse than Windows.

[SapporoChris]

Software & Updates->Updates->Automatically Check for updates:{Daily,Every two days,Weekly,Every Two Weeks,Never} and Security Updates{Display Immediately,Download Automatically,Download and install automatically}

There are even more options you can select.

[antsar]

If you want Ubuntu without the annoying, that's Debian.

[daemin]

I will probably be installing that on my servers soon. Luckily I don't need to use it as a desktop machine any more.

[dosisking]

Updating glibc is a huge pain.

Using a new version of gcc or clang can cause a lot of problems. I try to avoid updating those.

[consp]

I've had plenty of issues with old bundled GCC compilers which were fixed in later versions. I'm feeling this is a psychological thing, not necessarily software related. (Doesn't invalidate the feeling though)

[Chu4eeno]

It has to be a pain, everything depends on them (or rather, should, you still have holdouts like go fucking up things like NSS, holding back posix_spawn etc.).

In their defense the people working on glibc and gcc are pretty intelligent and spend a lot of time thinking about how everything they do affects their users, though they make mistakes like all humans (and LLMs I should say by now).