:: Re: [DNG] Pipewire and PulseAudio
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Auteur: Alexis PM
Datum:  
Aan: dng, Tomasz Torcz
Onderwerp: Re: [DNG] Pipewire and PulseAudio
> En lunes, 13 de diciembre de 2021 10:05:34 CET, Tomasz Torcz <tomek@???> escribió:
> On Sun, Dec 12, 2021 at 09:40:20PM -0800, Marc Shapiro via Dng wrote:
>> I was scrolling though my e-mail from the debian user group and I saw
>> mention of pipewire, as a replacement for pulseaudio. It seemed to suggest
>> that it was in Testing, so would not be available on my Devuan Stable
>> (chimaera) system, but I took a look, anyway. It seems to be available,
>> and, in fact, installed on my system. It seems to have been brought in by
>> zoom.
>
> Are you sure you want pipewire? Looking at the code:
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/commits/master
>
> Main contributor is from certain company associated with color red and
> a headgear. Given the sentiment on this list, you may want to think twice.


"pipewire" is not Red Hat's evil version of a supposedly innocent and community-based "pulseaudio". In fact, knowing who is behind each, although I distrust both, I think possibly more reliable the person behind "pipewire".

The creator of "pipewire" is Wim Taymans, Red Hat engineer, co-creator of the "gstreamer" multimedia framework together with Erik Walthinsen.

On the other hand, Lennart Poettering, Red Hat engineer too, is the person behind "pulseaudio" and "systemd". IMHO the pulseaudio design already subtly shows the Potterings way of doing things, which later became very clear with systemd: become not an alternative but the "de facto standard" of their area (sound or init) with a very personal ("poetterings") "new way" of doing things (but newer does not mean better) highly complex, intrusive, compatibility-despising and hostile (WONTFIX to every bug report he doesn't like), in confrontation with the "simpler and older" solution that works well (alsa or sysv) (but older does not mean worse, and simple is usually much better for auditing and fixing problems), in collusion with the company promoting them that wants to be the "de facto standard" of GNU/Linux (RedHat).

RedHat is not an enemy, it contributes by developing interesting free software. But RedHat is not a disinterested friend either, it is a company that seeks to monopolize the GNU/Linux world as a way to strengthen its dominance of the free software sector. It is a company so I understand that it cannot be asked to be different or act as if it were a non-profit entity (SUSE is no different, just smaller). RedHat is to be truly appreciated for developing free software, just that its free software developments should be used with care and critical approach. systemd as a complex that beyond being a simple init seeks to gobble up all GNU/Linux (udev, logging daemon, cron & anacron, hostname, date, locale, users accounts, groups and home directories, session management, network configuration, name resolution,...) is an example of RedHat software to be rejected by any GNU/Linux distro that is not made by RedHat (the serious Red Hat Entreprise Linux, its proving ground named Fedora, and the we-don't-know-how-to-manage-now, previously outside-RedHat RHEL reimplementation, CentOS).

Best regards.