> The true beauty of Linux is the way that the OS improves over time. Problems are ironed out, and legacy hardware support is often ongoing. I think this is unique to Linux.

I'm sorry, but the statement that linux improves over time, and thay's unique to linux has really no basis in reality. Both Windows and MacOS do improve over time, we could argue which of those three does the best job, but I don't really think linux would be the winner in that comparison either.

I don't have any experience with other OSes than those 3 mentioned, so somebody else can chip in.

With Windows, I've found that driver support often halts once a manufacturer has provided it's obligatory release. I think this is a limitation of the commercial closed source model that Windows (and OS X) follow.

I think an open source model encourages iterative improvement which isn't tied to commercial product releases.

This was the basis for my comment.

I agree with you that open source model should (and often does) solves problems with hardware support, at least in theory. Then again, my bluetooth on linux simply refuses to work, no matter what I do (while on the same hardware windows never had any problems).

Your original comment was a little bit ambiguous: you were primarily thinking of legacy hardware support as in "legacy hardware support is often ongoing". I read the first part of the sentence "Problems are ironed out" as if that's only valid for linux, which I don't think it is.

Is that an issue outside of video drivers?

But legacy hardware support doesn't improve in OS X. Try upgrading your PowerPC-based machine to Lion.

Now try running Linux 3.0rc on, let's say, an aging SPARC 5 workstation. Just Works.

You're right, there are examples, probably many where you will show linux supports hardware better than osx or windoze.

But hey, I use linux for the last two years for all my desktop computing (and more for servers). I love it and find it superior to windows. Except my bluetooth doesn't work: and it did with windows.

C'est la vie, I guess...

> but now, a few years on I can honestly say those problems are history

Believe me, they are not. They might be history for you, but not for everyone.

Many non-standard setups (using Jack, using pass-through, using bluetooth headsets) are still broken. Applications using Phonon have very different behaviors with or without PA. KMix and pavucontrol still behave very differently from each other...

It seems like most of your complaints have to do with KDE.

Gnome user here. PulseAudio is always screwing up the settings on/misbehaving with my SB Live 5.1, and there's no way to assign the rear or center/lfe outputs as headphone outputs instead, which is a piece of cake with plain ALSA (just use alsamixer to set the Wave Surround mixer to ~-16dB). Oh yeah, PulseAudio also ignores the decibel hints given by ALSA, and frequently sets the output gain to +12dB on some integrated sound cards, causing terrible distortion. Applications trying to work around the PulseAudio situation (Skype, Flash) by preventing me from selecting my hardware-mixed ALSA output have their own problems. I have many other complaints, but it's far easier to just uninstall PA and have a nice, clean audio system.

If you find a bug in actively maintained software like PulseAudio, please report it. The best thing to do here is not to work around a bug, but to participate in the community and help to improve the software.

That's the ideal situation, of course, but I disagree with the entire premise of PulseAudio. It has some interesting features (per-application volume, network audio, synchronization between sound cards at slightly different sample rates), but those should have been implemented as additions to ALSA and/or one of the jackd implementations.

There are also the hurdles to jump through of signing up for a bug tracker account, searching for existing similar bugs, watching my report get ignored because it's not an "average user" use case, etc. For someone like me who's experienced with ALSA, written a sound card driver, and had things "just work" for a very long time, there's greater incentive for me to just rip out PulseAudio and get back to work.

That is because I am using it those days, nothing more...

Gnome3 and Unity, I leave them the benefit of the doubt, because they are new, but GNOME people are usually the ones who are pushing those technologies.

PulseAudio has been crap for ages, and its rate of improvement is lethargic at best. What frustrates me most about PA is that one of the big selling points was "network transparency" a la X; however X it would seem is to be deprecated with graphics network transparency along with it. So why do we stick with PA then? Audio on Linux has more layers than an onion. I am using Ubuntu 10.04 on my desktops at the moment, when I move to the next LTS I will be moving to Xubuntu and leave all the GNOME/Unity/Wayland crap behind. If a X extension comes along that allows remote compositing and local display (a la VNC) in a native window by window fashion I will be a truly happy boy.

I think all of the big selling points of PulseAudio had similar tragic flaws. Either they were totally useless even conceptually (network transparent audio? really?) or conceptually at least so-so, but implemented so badly that they were also practically useless. My favorite example of the latter was the per-application volume control (which I've never wanted, but maybe somebody does) which pretty much ended up with the system volume occasionally getting set to the maximum value.

What's so odd about this is that I have this on my macbook now but in a much more straightforward way. Each application running that outputs sound has a volume control embedded in it (itunes, vlc, flash video in youtube, etc). I go to each one and adjust the volume. Not that hard. I realize PA was trying to centralize and offer more, but it's a solution looking for a problem in most cases.

And I tried out 'airfoil' the other day (I think that was the name) that let me push out audio from different apps on my mac to 'foil speakers'? - basically other software running to capture and playback that audio. I can essentially run and manage just the audio portion of itunes on mac 1 from software on mac 2. And it 'just worked' (to reclaim the ubuntu mantra). Ahh - here: http://www.rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/

Per application volume is the feature of PA most people wanted. Windows 7 has this and it works great. In PA however... not so much. Linux does need something like pulseaudio, but pulseaudio does indeed suck :(

PulseAudio has been one of those love/hate things. Per application audio is great when you want to mute an application that you can't mute otherwise (like a flash application for school simply won't shut up).

I hate how it keeps touching the volume level for the system/hardware.

I hear you regarding Shuttleworth & Ubuntu. Unfortunately, the GNOME developers don't seem to want to play ball & have seen Unity as a rival to GNOME Shell rather than as complementary or something to build on.