Leaving the Desktop Market

[Daniel Kalchev]

On 02.04.14 15:52, David Chisnall wrote:
> On 2 Apr 2014, at 13:40, Daniel Kalchev <daniel at digsys.bg> wrote:
>
>> On 02.04.14 12:22, David Chisnall wrote:
>>> The use case that PulseAudio was [over]designed to fix was plugging in USB headphones (or connecting a Bluetooth headset) and having existing audio streams redirected there.
>> Please don't ever make this behavior the default!
>>
>> Imagine, you have an audio setup mixing sound and pushing it out and then you plug in some USB device that also has "audio capability" and your production sound gets redirected there. A nightmare!
> Do you really think that someone is going to be setting up an audio mixing environment without configuring their sound setup?  Or that people doing this make up the majority of users?

Twenty years ago, very unlikely. Today, very much possible. Especially 
if the behavior is not explicitly documented.
>> Knowing what you do and the system behaving in predictable way is one of the beauties of UNIX and FreeBSD in particular.
> I agree, however sane defaults are also very important to a useable system and these are not mutually exclusive.  It is perfectly possible to have a system that has defaults that do what most users do (or a choice of defaults based on a simple selection of typical uses), but which is also configurable if you have unusual requirements.  This is what we aim to do with FreeBSD.

I have no problems with the sound system supporting different setups. I 
just fail to see the usefulness of such configuration, except in the 
very trivial setup, where you have only one output device and add 
another. What if there are three output audio devices in the systems? 
Trivial with all the HDMI etc today.

An overly auto-configuring system is a pain to deal with, sometimes. 
Especially if you cannot control some aspects of it's behavior. In such 
cases, you end up with a more complicated setup.

>> Don't make it so that even idiots can use it because then, only idiots will be using it!
> This kind of argument has no place in FreeBSD.  You are not a better person because you use things that are hard to use.  You are not a better person because you choose to do things the difficult way.  You are not a better person because you prove your superiority by making life hard for others.
>
> David

This was uncalled for, really.

Daniel