Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix

Re:Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix by brokenmachine on Sunday February 07, 2021 @06:02PM (#26059046)

I'm personally partial to the GPU drivers.

Every now and then I get booted to cli on startup and I have to reinstall the Nvidia drivers to get sddm to launch properly.

Also every time I reboot it's completely random if the login screen will be at 1080p or 4k (I have a 4k monitor).

Maybe it's because I've got an Nvidia card.

I'm scared to update because I know I'll have to spend hours fixing the audio and video, and whatever else again.

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Re:Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix by enriquto on Sunday February 07, 2021 @06:10PM (#26059095)

In the case of nvidia drivers, at least there is the (valid) excuse that the hardware vendor is purposefully hostile to linux. But failings of sound and localization are entirely of linux making.

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Re:Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix by fiddlerwoaroof on Sunday February 07, 2021 @06:44PM (#26059302)

Yeah, I know people “need” Nvidia but, I really wish people with the know-how would put some serious effort into making the deep learning stacks work well and easily on AMD cards: they may not be as fast, but AMD’s strategy is much more linux-friendly and it’d be nice for the FL/OSS community to work to make a Vega or Navi card easy to use for GPGPU.

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Re:Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix by nsajko on Sunday February 07, 2021 @07:40PM (#26059577)

Expending considerable effort to support each Linux release with Nvidia drivers is the opposite of being "purposefully hostile to Linux".

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Re:Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix by enriquto on Sunday February 07, 2021 @11:26PM (#26060780)

They shouldn't need to "support" any Linux "release" if they only published the specifications for their hardware like a civilized hardware vendor.

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Re:Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix by pjmlp on Monday February 08, 2021 @09:21AM (#26064768)

Like AMD, that only supports GL 3.3 on a GL 4.1 capable card?

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Re:Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix by account42 on Monday February 08, 2021 @09:56AM (#26065285)

For a few ten year old card models. Everything before and after supports whatever the HW can. Maybe it's time you let go of this grudge.

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Re:Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix by pjmlp on Monday February 08, 2021 @11:09AM (#26066347)

Maybe it is time to stop advocating open source drivers as something that benefits everyone.

Apparently old models get dropped just as with binary blobs, or maybe not, given that the Windows drivers work today just as 10 years ago with GL 4.1 and DX 11.

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Re:Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix by account42 on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @03:35AM (#26075158)

Well your hardware is from a time when AMD was still primarily pursuing the binary fglrx driver - if your card had an open source driver back then it would still work. What got dropped is the proprietary driver, not functionality from the open source driver. And with r600g being open source, people (mainly Red Hat's Dave Airlie) have been adding to it - in particular, there is OpenGL 4 support for some cards now, just not for all yet.

Just because you are unhappy that your card was too old to be included in the current open source driver does not mean you have to spread FUD about it.

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Re:Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix by pjmlp on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @04:40AM (#26075560)

It is not FUD, rather the proof that having open source drivers don't translate to support.

If anything, it helped my decision to focus on Apple, Microsoft and Google platforms, and let go of "Year of Linux Desktop" mantra.

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Re:Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix by nsajko on Sunday February 07, 2021 @07:41PM (#26059583)

FTR: I use Archlinux and the Archlinux maintainers take care of all of this for me.

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Re:Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix by pjmlp on Monday February 08, 2021 @03:45AM (#26062117)

The only surviving netbook where I still bother to run Linux bare metal now decided to start enabling the keypad overlay (for whatever reason), which naturally breaks the password entry.

So now I have to go through Fn+NumLock dance every time I bother to use the netbook.

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