App-y, app-y, joy, joy: Pain-free software installer Flatpak (kinda) works on Windows Subsystem for Linux Windows Subsystem for Linux fans, rejoice! Flatpak can now ease your dependency blues. Sort of. Lead developer Alexander Larsson has announced that software package toolkit Flatpak now works on Windows (or rather the Windows Subsystem for Linux). After a fashion. But then where would Linux users be, if it were not for the need …
TBH I thought pulse audio died a horrible death in the 4.4 kernel so why is this relevant in 2018
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Are you talking about pulse audio the sound server, which runs in _userspace_?
Pulse audio runs on top of alsa, which has a kernel bit.
Are you thinking of OSS?
Pulse audio was created around 15 years ago(Polypaudio), I don't know what the developer got but he should of got life in prison.
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interesting history lesson, but nothing to do with my question. Pulse audio has nothing to do with the linux kernel version, it was never in the kernel, it isn't in the kernel. Its all userspace.
I've never had any issues with it, was always easy to use and worked well enough.
Also "should *have"
I happen to _LIKE_ OSS, thanks. It's the driver model on FreeBSD. Not sure why Linux didn't just adopt it, too. Ah, well...
As for running things on WSL, maybe there should be a LSW or BSDSW i.e. something Microsoft writes and supports such that Windows software can run with Linux or *BSD as the OS. I'd even PAY MONEY for it.
And yes, this means a PROPER GUI that layers itself onto X11 and does _NOT_ require Wayland!
Bob, Linux did use OSS for some time, but never got it to work properly.. (Inability to play multiple streams was the main one - also the reason all these userspace daemon hacks appeared)
As typical of the Linux crowd, instead of fixing their OSS implementation, they came up with a new shiny-shiny.
Yes, at the time they were most vocal about software portability and microsoft lock-in, they came up with ALSA (where the "L" stands for "Linux")
When Linux people screamed for software to be portable, what they really meant was "it should run on Linux - we don't care about anything else)
So, now Linux has all sorts of audio APIs and userspace add-on hacks, whilst FreeBSD OSS "just works" (yet has to have crappy emulation layers to cope with software written hardcoded to one of the crappy API's)
I happen to _LIKE_ OSS, thanks. It's the driver model on FreeBSD. Not sure why Linux didn't just adopt it, too. Ah, well...
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Linux did use OSS. It was the original sound system. The problem was that the company developing it tried to make it closed source, which caused issues. I vaguely remember the switch being very disruptive for playing games at the time.
One of the motivations behind user space sound servers being made, to handle both OSS and alsa and badly behaved applications taking too aggressive ownership of things.
Actually that was OSS not PulseAudio, the latter of which has never actually been in the kernel (since it's not a hardware driver, it's a sound server that merely processes output from drivers), and the former has in fact been disabled by default for years.
Personally I just use ALSA with a simple asoundrc config that gives me access to the hardware DSP and equaliser, something I was never able to figure out with pulseaudio. If I can remember that far back, I'm pretty sure this was trivial to do with OSS too, before it jumped the shark by going proprietary and everyone abandoned it.
Larsson explained that a lack of support for seccomp or network namespaces limits things somewhat. ... [and so and on for more missing bits]
If you want all Linux features, the only way still is to run the real thing. But of course this was a cool hack, just to see if it can be done. Don't show this to pointy-haired bosses, who might then imagine the developers have no more need of real Linux to get work done, and ban it.
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