Re:Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000
by rwmj on Monday October 14, 2019 @06:41AM
(#21246752)
My recollection of Linux in year 2000 was it was very easy to understand how everything worked. If you were searching for "terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best" then you were definitely doing it wrong (in 2000 and now).
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That was ~2008 imo, with 2.6 kernel, way before gtk3, pulseaudio, upstart, etc. although compiz was black magic already.
Mine, is that my using my soundcard could randomly freeze my machine needing a reset.
Most likely to be a driver (or even hardware) bug. I had a SB AWE32 card which would do that, and I even hacked on the driver for a while to try to diagnose it before concluding the soundcard was probably taking PCI bus master and never releasing it, not really something that Linux could do anything about.
It's possible that the equivalent Windows driver - which didn't crash - had a secret workaround to prevent it from tickling the hardware bug. I used to work on OS-9 drivers for custom hardware at my first job, and we usually ended up bodging the driver to fix hardware bugs, because respinning the hardware was terribly expensive or even not possible in the time available.
Creative was notorious for having chipset-specific PCI bus master issues even on Windows. The only way to fix it was to disable bus master, and that is what Creative drivers did on Windows.
On Linux you were expected to be a grown boy and do it yourself in the BIOS.