InitWare, a portable systemd fork running on BSDs and Linux

"everything about systemd sucks" people generally don't understand the problems that systemd is attempting to remediate, in my experience. Just repeating dogma that they heard someone they consider cool say.

Or perhaps, we don't have the problems that systemd is trying to solve. Or systemd creates new problems that we didn't need or want. Kind of like pulseaudio.

Yeah pulseaudio was like "you need this so you can have two apps playing music at the same time" entirely ignoring the existence of sound cards with mixers or the alsa soft mixer. Similarly, systemd was hyped at the time for, among others, allowing parallel service start entirely ignoring the several init systems that were already managing parallel start quite happily.

This turned out to be entirely the right approach, though, and it was probably pretty obvious even at the time. Sound Cards with built in mixers have all but died out. Everything they did has been eaten by software,

Even at the time, few games used an API where they managed multiple channels directly; Software mixing was commonplace from the 90s. Any game that wanted to play battle sounds was not relying on the mere 6-8 channels that cards from that time could handle.

Our modern Pipewire based workflow is remarkably simple and remarkably effective, and it's significantly an evolution of PA.

I find it indicative of the quality of these complaints that sound cards with mixers were brought up at all. As if that's a good reason to hate PA.

I'm always happy to discuss sound cards with mixers, though! As a supporter of the Bloop Museum[1], I think that the "What might have been" if we had dedicated hardware for playing dozens or hundreds of sound files at a time is an interesting question. There's a lot of experimentation in the audio space that has kind of died out, because audio is so cheap - While over in in graphics, we're still seeing interesting advancements and dead ends.

[1] https://oldbytes.space/@bloopmuseum

No, I hate PA cause it didn't work properly to the end. (Pipewire was better day 1 than PA ever was.) I just think that "you absolutely need PA to have multiple apps playing sound" was always nonsense, and the same sort of nonsense that was used to push systemd.

Yeah, that was total nonsense. Good cards existed. And if you didn't have a good card, alsa had a soft mixer. FreeBSD added a softmixer to OSS, too, so you didn't even need alsa. Worst case, you could run the Enlightenment sound daemon without Enlightenment and it was compact and just worked (as long as you had a simple sound setup)

I do. systemd solves a lot of my problems, actually. Of course all of systemd could be cobbled together by combining a dozen or so independent projects, but that mess is exactly why normal people (even normal computer people) shy away from Linux.

And I don't recall a lot of software working well when Pulse isn't available, so I don't know why people still bring it up. Perhaps it's because I wasn't there at the time, but I've only seen ALSA as "that audio system you use when you have nothing else available". I still need the PulseAudio-wrapper for Pipewire to be useful for my systems, so clearly the Linux world has moved to Pulse-first.