#144

I thought being “pro” was about knowing your tools and involved a life-long reading of manuals, docs, schematics, articles, theses etc… pertaining to one’s domain and possibly a few related others. But it also apparently involves having to cope with tons of useless stuff to be able to actually work (esp. when computers with any kind of generalist purpose are involved).

How much time for Pipewire to become a dependency of some random but needed application and to break systems working fine so far ? :smiley:

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#145

I saw PipeWire come up on the ALSA mailing list a while ago, my response is and was “oh no”. Like @ermina said, bracing for an inconvenient, workflow-disrupting addition of audio routing software built by developers focused on a consumer use-case. Hubris for sure.

This article from January: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2018/01/26/an-update-on-pipewire-the-multimedia-revolution-an-update/

Jack Support

Another important goal of PipeWire was to bring all Linux audio and video together, which means PipeWire needed to be as good or better replacement for Jack for the Pro-Audio usecase. This is a tough usecase to satisfy so while getting the video part has been the top development priority Wim has also worked on verifying that the design allows for the low latency and control needed for Pro-Audio. To do this Wim has implemented the Jack protocol on top of PipeWire.

Oh joy, audio sounds like such a priority. If you scroll down, Paul Davis defends the state of Linux audio when a reader jumps for the cliche “finally, audio in Linux!” tagline (ommitting any enthusiasm for PipeWire which I don’t think is a mistake).

Lastly I despise the name ‘PipeWire’ :sweat_smile: --camel-case spelling and all. It reminds me of something I would have come up with when I was a teenager just getting into this stuff for the first time.

EDIT: ugh plus api’s and code looks like a mess. https://pipewire.github.io/pipewire/annotated.html

#146

Curious what you would point out specifically about the pipewire APIs? The stream API seems fine to me, for example: https://pipewire.github.io/pipewire/classpw__stream.html

#147

This is, of course, opinion. I should have probably omitted my api criticisms but here they are to haunt me for the duration of the internet’s existence.

The core api feels like it sacrifices compactness and succinctness for… short function names and generality. Simply annoying to use. I’d also prefer to define more of my own data structures and general functions like event loops. This is exactly why I don’t enjoy using C++, monolithic libraries like Qt and Boost that force you into an entire ecosystem of types and standard functions, separate from the language’s primitive constructs, that become necessary or things stop building.

I just feel like there’s no comparison.

https://pipewire.github.io/pipewire/classpw__core.html
https://pipewire.github.io/pipewire/classpw__client.html
https://pipewire.github.io/pipewire/classpw__work__queue.html
https://pipewire.github.io/pipewire/classpw__link.html
https://pipewire.github.io/pipewire/data-loop_8c.html
https://pipewire.github.io/pipewire/structpw__memblock.html

vs.

http://jackaudio.org/files/docs/html/index.html
http://jackaudio.org/files/docs/html/group__PortFunctions.html
http://jackaudio.org/files/docs/html/group__ServerControl.html
http://jackaudio.org/files/docs/html/group__ClientFunctions.html
http://jackaudio.org/files/docs/html/group__ClientCallbacks.html

1 Like
#148

Poop.

#149

Why is this a bad thing? We’re years ahead of Microsoft’s battle with open source. Seems like larger enterprises are more fully embracing its value.

And while I think diversity should be a priority, there’s no way chip fabrication facilities would exist to create such cost-effective products (that give birth to lovely end-user products like norns) without corporate capital.

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#150

Well, historically ‘embracing its value’ is just step 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

#151

That’s a nice one-liner, but exactly how does that apply to Microsoft contributing 60000 patents to the Open Invention Network?

#152

Sadly, I will not be doing Linux on the desktop with the new DAW. Arch on a MacBook mid 2012 appears to have significant display complexity due to proprietary drivers.

In macOS Ardour in Homebrew is broken on High Seirra. So I’m paying $45 to get a build. Seems like a better price than debugging X and Nvidia drivers.

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#153

It’s more that I don’t think IBM is a good fit, or at least modern IBM, which strikes me as being a consulting driven company.

Red Hat have funded a lot of work on the desktop technologies that we use (along with a lot of server stuff), e.g. Gnome, systemd (don’t start…), PulseAudio (ditto), etc. I just don’t see IBM caring about that stuff. RHEL has always been trendsetting even though it’s so conservative, if they announce that so-and-so software is going to be in the next RHEL release, we all take notice. I worry that with IBM, RHEL will just become another Oracle Linux.

I think I’d actually have been happier had Microsoft bought them! You have to wonder if they or someone else is now going to make a play for Canonical, as they’re the last big independent Linux company out there.

As an aside, while I don’t use Windows anymore, I did work as a C# developer for a long time. Microsoft are a very developer focused company, and I think that they will be good stewards for GitHub. Whatever you think of their methods in the past, they’ve always struck me as a company that believes in empowering people through technology, and in that regard there is a similarity to the open source community. Sadly there seem to be few organisations with that attitude any more.

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#154

Ardour’s ecommerce section for the paid version is…a bit oops. It was difficult for me to give money for an installer but I did it! Still took less time than building from source, though it would be cool to have a dedicated Linux desktop with Arch + Ardour and a nice HiDPI display, which is not a nice thing to do with the mid 2012 macbook pro.

It’d be cool to have a contemporary hardware list for a Linux DAW with a display system that could deliver the same expectations as less free platforms.

1 Like
#155

Thanks for supporting Ardour :slight_smile:
From what I can recall Linux on the Macbooks (Intel and PowerPC) has always been a bit finicky.

And for what it’s worth I’ve been using Linux for thirteen or fourteen years and it’s installed cleanly on every pc-based laptop/desktop I’ve owned (and only needed hardware lists for kernel driver reference). Once-upon-a-time I did have problems with Netgear’s old pci-based wg311v3 with its absence of native linux drivers though.

EDIT: I have a recently released Lenovo X1 Extreme coming Wednesday. This was released in September with a Coffee Lake i7-8850H so it’s a good candidate for ‘brand new thing, but does it run Linux?’. I’ll post a brief note on my exp here

2 Likes
#156

Thanks, this looks really interesting.

#157

I’ve become subjectively accustomed to the HiDPI also branded “Retina” displays that Apple (I speculate uses their patents) to sell. I don’t know what hardware isn’t locked up in the Fruit Company’s propriety and has a similar visual experience.

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#158

The 2015 (ie MacBookPro11,4) works fine as long as you avoid the nvidia graphics card. You have to custom config it, but can pick the fastest CPU and no dGPU.
I’m currently using that and it works fine, no issues. The newer ones aren’t really any faster, only some 6 core laptops are.

I use this custom config because the graphics switching stuff is a nightmare + a dGPU is only generating heat and wasting power + using nvidia on linux somewhat sucks because of a lacking open-source driver.
Unfortunately no other manufacturer currently offers a high-end CPU with just the built in GPU. The HP Zbook studio is the only one I know of that allows some CPUs without a dGPU, but not the high-end CPUs unfortunately. I don’t have good experiences with HP laptops though, so quiet reluctant to go that way.

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#159

This is one of the threads I’ve been looking for. Specifically, I have some Apple hardware that I read could easily run any Linux distro with a new kernel but the more I looked into the details the more I learned about how bad the Retina display would look with the mash of X drivers and utils required to make it work as the vendor intended.

So…what hardware should I get for a dedicated Linux (I’m fond of Arch) DAW running Ardour 5?

Linux at Last
#160

Lol…discourse moved it automatically…

#161

Finally got around to configuring my Lenovo X1 Extreme. It’s got the Intel 8850h coffee lake processor, Geforce 1050ti, a few newer chips for wifi,etc, and a Wacom usb touchscreen bundled with a 4k IPS panel. Other than the usual Gentoo Linux install hurdles my largest obstacles were:

  1. Installing a newer Linux kernel to support the new wifi chipset. Not really an obstacle, but it took a minute to find out that the Intel iwlwifi driver in the kernel doesn’t support the a370 version 10 device until 14.7.3 or so I opted for 4.18.9 and it’s smooth sailing.
  2. The new xorg-server (mine is 1.28.3) required me to use specify the virtual terminal (the default is vt7 and I get ‘permission denied’). I have a feeling most Linux distro’s probably have a graphical login manager to do this, but I now have to run startx -- vt1 now for my X session to work.
    Other than that, the touchscreen is working and my DWM/RXVT-Unicode configuration moved right in and I"m having a pretty good time on a newly released Lenovo laptop!
#162

I think you only have user permissions to virtual consoles that you’ve logged into these days. If you want to use other VTs you need to have X11 setuid (which isn’t great idea anymore…).

You can use the environment variable XDG_VTNR to grab your VT number.

It’s also worth checking the contents of ~/.xserverrc and /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc

2 Likes
#163

That last item is a fun change that was made in the latest xorg-server ebuilds without adding a news item. Just wasted 2 hours on that yesterday :expressionless:

Easiest fix/workaround is USE +=suid which fortunately still works. I’m not sure there’s a way to make it work with rootless Xorg if you don’t use systemd/elogind. See https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=670212

1 Like