Why is it so hard to get basic sound working on Linux? And by basic I mean I want to be able to play iTunes inside a windows VMware VM and hear my mail notifier on my host tell me that one of you has written another asshat comment.

And don’t tell me “it works now!” Because it doesn’t. I just tried it.

The number of moving parts in Linux’s audio stack is just plain inexcusable. OSS, ALSA, dmix, esd, arts, pulseaudio, jack, nas. On top of that you have libraries that that can talk to one or many of these systems: libaio, libasound, phonon, gstreamer. And why have KDE and Gnome for the past 10 years not been able to agree on how to play sound, or configure sound? Linux is about choice right? What if I choose something other than KDE or Gnome? do I lose? Is my only choice to have someone earfuck me so hard that I go deaf and I don’t have to worry about it anymore? Maybe Linux is only ready for my grandma, because she can’t hear anything anyway?

amen. actually, amen to the whole blog and subscribed. See also Linux audio: it’s a mess. another example