Re: [Jack-Devel] FOSS & stuff (Was: Re: The Situation(s) With JACK)

Hi,

I don't want to get dragged into a longwinded discussion on this as it's  
very old ground. I have had essentially this conversation on dozens of  
occasions, and it usually degenerates quickly into "ur a loser" and  
generalised adolescent attacks on my technical ability.

But I'll try to respond briefly.

> 1) as was already noted, its clear at this point that talking about
> "Linux" as an OS is a mistake.

Then it's an extremely common mistake.

The reason for my ire, if any, on this subject is that I am constantly  
bashed by Linux people who want me to use Linux, who claim that Linux can  
do X, Y or Z things that my Windows system does. Only after many hours of  
highly technical messing about does one find that getting any one Linux  
workstation to do all of X, Y and Z simultaneously if they were developed  
on different distros can be, to put it mildly, extremely difficult.

I am not interested in technical, or even largely semantic, arguments on  
the basis that "linux is a kernel and the window manager is KDE and the  
audio subsystem is pulseaudio" or whatever, anymore than I care that  
quartz.dll is where directshow lives. It's part of windows, it's in the  
OS, it's there, it works, beyond that who gives a damn.

> The fact that there are different ways to do something in
> Fedora, Arch and Ubuntu is not really conceptually any different from
> the fact that there are different ways to do it on Windows XP and
> Windows 7, or Windows and OS X.

Windows XP and 7 are even now vastly more cross-compatible than any two  
distributions of linux. In any case, it is intended that Win7 should  
replace XP. It is not intended that Arch should replace Ubuntu, they are  
supposed to coexist. The various, incompatible linux distros are a  
disaster, and the only way to fix that disaster is to make them all so  
similar that there's not much point in having more than one.

> Microsoft's approach to this is largely to say "We don't care, what we
> do is (so good|good enough) that we don't think that the benefits of
> all this experimentation outweighs the benefits of the chaos and
> confusion is also creates".

I think you need to be in a very, very special edge case for that not to  
be true, at least where the degree of chaos and confusion is as bad as  
that which Linux creates. I think that is even more likely to be true when  
you are dealing with media software that has to be usable by creatives.

> Its vastly more of a mess than Linux.

I don't care, because:

> Microsoft pays a lot of people a lot of money to paper over the cracks.

See? (and actually I disagree, I've been doing media on computers for ten  
years and I hadn't even heard of one of the things you mentioned).

There have been comments in this thread to the effect that people are  
unaware of the elegance or capabilities of Jack. This is rather like  
saying that people are unaware of the elegance (if any) of Directshow,  
which is clearly ridiculous. Nobody cares. Nobody should have to care. It  
is irrelevant. Computers are not about demonstrating one's abilities as a  
software engineer, or about creating engineering solutions that express  
elegance, or about being an "important" person who can swagger around at  
linux conventions being the lead engineer on an important project.  
Computers are about doing work for users. If all else is not subordinate  
to that, well, to borrow a phrase from too many linux users: "computing,  
ur doin it wrong".

Phil

1323448665.19084_0.ltw:2,a <op.v58dsnq7pae0ge at cobaltbox dot mshome dot net>