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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Pipewire vs PulseAudio: What's the Difference? (itsfoss.com)

submitted 8 months ago by petsoi@discuss.tchncs.de to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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[–] nintendiator@feddit.cl 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Xfree? Who's talking about that? I've only ever had to use Xorg, and I only ever needed to touch its conf file if I needed to fiddle with the refresh rate of an external monitor. (Compared to that, its """"modern"""" replacement Wayland doesn't even start a full desktop session on my machine)

No, we're talking about the crap that was PulseAudio, and how ALSA; which is unrelated to XFree, worked almost flawlessly and barely needed any configuration. Formatted my machine several times and remember there was someties a path to the dev (/dev/snd or something like that usually, I think? I sometimes see it thrown around when doing advanced stuff with stuff like mpv) but I was lucky that when I had to edit my file it was for hardware bugs and not for software things. I... think? nowadays that bug is acknowledged for either at the ALSA or the Pipewire level, haven't delved enough to check.

Dealing with sound servers on the Linux community does feel like a rarity going-backwards kind of thing: to this day, Firefox for some weird ass-reason dropped ALSA support in favour of PulseAudio. But in Debian, the packaged Firefox versions continue to work with ALSA flawlessly - as if support never was dropped, despite the many versions and changes since. Which suggests me to think Mozilla never actually dropped support, they just flipped a switch somewhere to promote PA instead, which usually comes down to money deals. Mozilla is an expert at that kind of thing.

[–] Auzy@beehaw.org 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

That's my point. I've been using Linux from before xorg existed. Back in those days, things didn't auto configure.

Sorry, we'll agree to disagree here about sound servers..

Just because audio worked perfectly for you, I assure you, it wasn't the case for everyone else at the time. Not everything defaulted to OSS or ALSA. So, there was often additional configuration involved.

And pulse was the only one to convince everyone to drop their sound servers and provide a way to support them all. That's a huge accomplishment. Whilst it could be argued that ALSA had the potential to do so, maybe.. But they didn't

It was such a pity they didn't include JACK support though, because that seriously held back the Linux Music production community (which is mostly seamless in Windows and MacOS)