On Saturday, 14 September 2013 at 06:57:23 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
decided to seriously look into finding a Linux distro that I could live with. I chose Debian.
I went with Slackware when I started, actually due to the zipslack thing, and then never looked back. You might say "well there's your problem" cuz slack doesn't use package managers. But I've spent enough time on debian and centOS that my opinion of package managers hasn't changed at all: nice when they work, but they don't most the time.
The biggest culture hit for me the first time I did use them though was the -devel libraries. On Slackware, all libraries are devel, they just do it all together. And really, why wouldn't you? This is linux! (and we are KLINGONS! sorry i couldnt resist)
But slackware packages are simple and to the point. They're just tarballs with everything you need (except recursive dependencies, but you usually already have them - assuming you can actually find a slackware package, getting rarer each year, sadly - they are built against the core system and tend to work well).
Still not my *ideal* system, but despite my complaining, I actually do like it. The biggest problem is nowadays everyone does deb and rpm instead.
Windows and most of the other distros at the time offered: the ability to install a bare minimum system that could still function without *requiring* X11
oh god X11 was too brutally slow to use on an older computer anyway. Windows 95 was actually fast.
Anyway, long story short, I found that while Linux, like any other modern OS, required sacrificing some flexibility -- you don't deal directly with the hardware anymore
There was vm86 mode though... I got this program DOSEmu that did that and it rocked. But now I'm on 64 bit.
Actually though now there's the whole qemu/kvm virtualization stuff who's potential I really don't think has been fully explored. Not only could you run programs for other systems, but you could also potentially sandbox them really well, better than user accounts and processes alone.
o_O What system *are* you using?? I've been using Debian's default ALSA installation for the last, oh, decade?
I actually use ALSA too, but some of the programs are OSS emulation (which rocks btw. Ever try to program ALSA? What a piece of shit, oss works the way it should, just write some crap to /dev/dsp).
If I opt in to the alsa programs they mix sounds fine, but there's more latency. Not a problem sometimes, but it bugs me other times, and besides, like I said I think locking the audio device is sometimes a feature rather than a bug.
But still, it's ridiculous, they should have just fixed OSS back then to mix and keep up with the drivers (someone did! but they made it closed source so linux couldn't look at it. But the FreeBSD people fixed oss too.)
There are some weird system things too though. The ALSA volume control (alsamixer to interface with it, but it is in the system itself) is really weird. Most the values don't seem to do anything on my new hardware.
On my old motherboard, the volume control worked like you'd expect. Master has a wide range, PCM had a wide range, they'd work together.
My new motherboard is weird. PCM does virtually nothing. Master works well from about 20 to 80, but setting it to zero doesn't actually silence it (usually) and going to 100 just distorts it. I guess distortion is expected with digital audio maxing out, but my old mobo didn't do it.
Now, on the bright side, at least alsa actually works now. When I was doing it ten years ago, that was a huge victory.
