It's difficult to infer what kind of nuts is going on here.

If we're going to socialize production, let's do it properly.

> Red hat certainly burns a lot of money in service of horrifyingly bad people.

Red Hat also has a nasty habit of pushing their decisions onto the other distributions; e.g.

- systemd

- pulseaudio (this one was more Fedora IIRC)

- Wayland

- Pipewire (which, to be fair, wasn't terrible by the time I tried it)

Pushing their decisions? This is comical.

I guess Debian, SUSE, Canonical, etc get that email from Red Hat just go along with it. We better make the switch, we don’t want our ::checks notes:: competitor made at us.

systemd and friends go around absorbing other projects by (poorly) implementing a replacement and then convincing the official project to give up.

Pipewire rocks. Wayland it's half baked and a disaster on legacy systems. SystemD... openrc it's good enough, and it never fails at shutdown.

I don’t know where they come from, but I try to avoid all in that list. To be fair, audio is a train wreck anyway.

Eh, pulseaudio got a lot better, and pipewire "just works" at this point (at least for me). Even Bluetooth audio works OOTB most of the time.

Maybe. The background of my comment: in the end of 90's I worked in a company doing professional audio in windows. We had multiple cards, with multiple inputs and outputs, different sampling frequencies, channels, bits per sample... The API was trivial. I learned it in 1 hour.

FF to last year, I was working with OpenGL (in linux), I thought "I will add sound" boy... I was smashed by the zoo of APIs, subsystems one on top of another, lousy documentation... Audio, which for me was WAY easier as video, suddenly was way more complicated. From the userland POV, last year I also wanted to make a kind of BT speaker with a raspeberry pi, and also was terrible experience.

So, I don't know... maybe I should give a try to pipewire, at the time I was done after fighting with alsa and pulseaudio, the first problem I killed it.