Windows 7 is enough to kill Linux on the desktop

[dsio]

My XP gaming partition caught the flu just recently. For some reason I can only use one program or game that uses sound, then sound doesn't work until a reboot. So like I watch a video in firefox, or play some music, or whatever, and thats it, no other apps can use sound until it reboots.

I mean seriously, ALSA is crap. But it was designed that way: to be still crap but slightly less crap than OSS. What the hell is Windows XP's excuse?

[Gizmo]

Originally Posted by dsio

What the hell is Windows XP's excuse?

It's not Windows 7. (ducks)

[Daniel ~]

I'm not convinced. I am far from an evangelist: I ditched my idealist streak the day I sold my soul to the oil industry,

I've never stopped hoping you would reconsider my friend. The world still needs good men. The world still needs that they be good. The world still needs.........that they lay down their lives to see right done.

Sorry....I just get lonely....and who esle tells you these things? ":O}

[Kaitain]

Originally Posted by dsio

I mean seriously, ALSA is crap. But it was designed that way: to be still crap but slightly less crap than OSS.

I've spent an entertaining evening reading an ongoing bitch-fight between the developers of a high-level sound API called Phonos, that happens to have a Qt (read: KDE) dependency, and the developers of GStreamer, a much more nuts-n-bolts system that happens to depend on various Gnome libraries.

All I can say is it's bloody lucky that ALSA is as good as it is, given the standard of debate among developers.

Still, these are people devoting spare time to a hobby project. Where I'm concerned, ALSA works better on my laptop than Vista: on Vista any major ethernet, hard disc, USB, bluetooth or wifi activity, or anything vaguely processor-intensive causes sound to snap, crackle and pop. On Linux... it just copes. I didn't even need to pass module parameters to the kernel!

So for me where the bitching, squabbling masses of Linux sound-system developers somehow manage to put out a system that works on recent hardware better than the manufacturer's own Vista drivers can, I can't help thinking that something is deeply wrong in Planet Redmond, and don't choose to visit until they fix it.

(Bootnote: I don't understand why people don't throw their weight solidly behind SDL, which strikes me as a cross-platform FOSS form of DirectX).

[Samuknow]

I tried the beta last weekend. It installed very fast and booted quickly also. Then that is where the honey moon ended. I could not find anything. I had to type in the search/run box to find basic settings. Then I tried a couple of games. 3 hours later and I was formatting and back to Vista. Which I still hate.

I want an OS that is different. Not a different spin on the same tired thing. I want something that installs as easy as W7 did. Updates as easily but actually works and doesn't cost as much as half of my hardware does. With MS headed down the road they are on, Linux has no worries.