Fedora & Sound: an excercise in frustration

[Dimi Paun]

On Sat, 2007-07-21 at 00:21 -0400, Josef Bacik wrote:
> Which kernel was it working in?  Can you boot back into that kernel
> and have it work? 

I'm not even sure what kernel that was, yum seems to have gotten rid
of it already. But since I run an up-to-date Fedora, that shouldn't
be hard to determine. I know 3228 broke it, which kernel was before it?

But beyond that, the reason I post to this list is that I feel this
is a deep problem that has to be looked at. I've been using Red Hat
since version 4, and the last Fedoras have been more flaky than any
other.

I could not, in good faith, recommend it to anyone -- they'd just
start hating Linux, and feel disgusted.

It seems to me that a large part of what a desktop is good for
this days is:
  * web: Firebug stopped working for me mysteriously with no
         indication. Hours spent looking at the problem were
         just a waste of time (resolved itself a few days ago)
  * email: see my previous posts about the hell I went through 
         with evolution (thing are good now in F7).
  * sound: completely and utterly broken for me. At least in the
         old days you would labour to get it to work, and then
         it worked. Now, it will magically start/stop working
         with no indication WTF it did so.
  * office: another nightmare, as it stopped working more than
         a month ago, again without indication, warning, or error.
         strace, google, irc#, bugzilla were of no help whatsoever.
         You would start an app, and it would silently exit a few
         seconds later. Could not generate invoices, open attachments,
         it was terrible. Why did it take so long to fix such an
         important bug?

All these are showstopper bugs -- people's workflow/businesses/use of
the computer depend on them, in a very fundamental way. What good is
the computer to most people if the above don't work? Why are we so
carelessly pushing out updates (that the user will automagically get)
that breaks the above?

It is the first time in the last 10 years that I really started to
doubt that I can depend n my Linux box for anything important.
In fact, it is the first time in that timeframe that I've actually
turned to my Windows box for essential things that I have always 
done on Linux.

Horrible. 

-- 
Dimi Paun <dimi at lattica.com>
Lattica, Inc.