Sound doesn't work, again!

[Dimi Paun]

On Sat, 2009-05-16 at 20:51 -0400, David wrote:
> 1) Your oldest bug is about three weeks old. The other three are three
> days old. The oldest bug did receive attention but I do not believe
> that you supplied the requested information from what I read.

It's really not helpful to tell me when I filed the latest bugs.
I've been using RedHat/Fedora Linux since about '96 exclusively
on all my boxes, so you can imagine that there's a lot more to this
than the last batch of bugs that I reported.

> 2) In that oldest bug you said that you have a pre-release of Fedora
> 11, which would be the development branch known ad Rawhide, running on
> your production machine. That does not make good sense.

Well, it does. I've said over and over on this list that ever since F3,
I had horrible trouble with sound, to the point that I gave up on it for
years -- it was just too frustrating to have to deal with it breaking
every few days for no apparent reason.

I used to run F8 until recently, with PA giving me no end of trouble.
I could _not_ upgrade to either F9 or F10 due to a very serious bug
in Anaconda/dmraid: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=468649
(essentially you could not install on a RAID 1 partition).

Out of insane frustration with the sound, I decided to try the F11 Beta,
being the first Fedora since F8 (!) that would install on a BIOS RAID 1
disk (is that such a rare setup I wonder?)

This was a bit better than F8 in terms of PA crashing like crazy after
1-3h of use, but right of the bat I had troubles:
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=493790
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=493788
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=498094
  
> Might I suggest that you install a release version of Fedora. I would
> suggest Fedora 10 as Fedora 9 will EOL in a little over a month? that
> way your production machine can still do it's job and you can have
> more time to research your problem.

This is sending me on a wild goose chase. I know that sound sucked 
_badly_ in F8, F9/10 is out of the question, and besides, the problems
that I am having will not be fixed by me moving off of F11. 

Look, I know I'm frustrated. You would be too when you
  - run bog-standard hardware
  - run non-patched, as pristine as possible version of Fedora
  - you spend ~1h almost daily to get sound out of Flash, Skype,
    Rhythmbox, etc, sound that you just fixed, and it stopped
    working out of the blue. Almost daily!

But the bottom line is that I am a old timer when it comes to Linux,
and an experience hacker to boot. I'm easily in the top 1% of technical
users. If this drove me insane, how would a non-technical user feel?

The big problem is that instead of this giving the community pause
(OK, the guy maybe grumpy and frustrated, but we might have a genuine
problem on our hands), I am given condescending advice that would put
me on a sterile goose chase.

Guys, I'm one of the people that stuck around and helped. Do you
honestly think Fedora would be any better if it drove me away?

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