Teenage Engineering gear is not meant to last. It is an illusion created by how their product looks like and how it is marketed. Once the warranty expires, you won't be able to repair products like TX-6. I've gotten bitten by that myself. TE does not really provide much support to its users to help them maintain and repair this expensive gear.
The defaults are absolutely sane. I've been using FreeBSD with root on ZFS on all sorts of workstations and laptops for many years now. It's always run just fine, even on cheap laptops with 2 GB of RAM.
It probably helps that OpenDTrace has a published specification that you can use to not only to reimplement bits of DTrace from scratch but also to agree on a common behavior across many operating systems: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-924.pdf
This may not be the answer you are looking for, but OccamBSD seems to be a way to produce a minimal image for use in FreeBSD jails, FreeBSD bhyve and Xen: https://github.com/michaeldexter/occambsd
And for good reason. If people already call command completion bloat, imagine the uproar if they found out that bash or zsh is built in and the default shell.
FreeBSD is often used as the base for appliances, so some downstream users it may indeed be unnecessary code to maintain. (You perhaps get 'extra' CVEs against your product that may increase maintenance.)
For those with CLI access, adding a more full-featured shell is fairly easy with pkg.
I remember using the OSS drivers and even paying for the commercial version at one point. The experience was great, and I hated it because it was a repudiation of Open Source, which was a big part of my identity back then. I had sold out to the man for working audio… but work it did.
Considering that OSS was (and still is) run by just a few people and is a small company, I don't think it's "selling out to the man"; it's not Microsoft or Amazon or anything. They tried to be as "open source as possible" while still ensuring they've got money to it. I don't think anyone got very rich from it.
Although details differ, all of this is still not really a solved problem today. People want to have their cake and eat it too.
Oh, yes, certainly my comment about selling out to the man was made tongue-in-cheek, poking fun at my younger self and how very serious I was about these things in the past. I am happy to see OSS earn some money for their efforts, even if my general personal disposition is still for open source.
I was a bit surprised to hear they are still a business in 2021. I see they are still releasing OSS and much of it under a GPL license too. I gather their OSS product customers must have some specialist sound system requirements for Linux / FreeBSD.
With ALSA, Pulseaudio, and now Pipewire there's not much point really; maybe it's better but that ship has sailed, on Linux anyway. It's become VHS vs. Betamax-kind of lamenting.
4Front seems to be working on https://www.truepianos.com now; though that one's not open source and no Linux version either.
I don't have an account on Lobsters so I can't comment there, but that comment is pretty awful and includes some revisionist history nonsense. The author seriously has their timeline mixed up and doesn't seem to be aware of what actually happened in Linux land, so I would take everything they say with a grain of salt. I have no idea why Linux audio seems to invite so much FUD.
"A bit later, a new version of OSS came out, OSS 4, which was not released as open source. The Linux developers had a tantrum and decided to deprecate OSS and replace it with something completely new: ALSA."
This is blatantly false. ALSA begun development in 1998 because of missing features in the OSS API [1], in terms of both drivers and userspace. OSSv4 was not released until 9 years later in 2007 [2]. Various other Linux developers have also expressed unhappiness with deficiencies in the OSS API [3]. Whichever tantrum is being talked about here seems to be wholly fictional.
"Meanwhile, the FreeBSD team just forked the last BSD licensed OSS release and added support for OSS 4 and in-kernel low-latency sound mixing..."
This entire paragraph makes no sense to me and has nothing to do with OSSv4. Announcement of an OSSv4 compatible API didn't happen until 2006 [4], which is well into the FreeBSD 6.x series.
"It was several years before audio became reliable on Linux again and it was really only after everything was, once again, rewritten for PulseAudio. Now it’s being rewritten for PipeWire."
This makes no sense. Applications that were written with basic ALSA/OSS support just worked if they used the Pulseaudio PCM. Applications that used ESD or aRts had issues, but you had the same problems on BSD if you wanted to use GNOME or KDE. Also, Pipewire is explicitly backwards compatible with PulseAudio, so nothing is being rewritten.
It amazes me how much time has passed since then. I would have to go and look up the history and events to remember what order things happened.
However, with my FreeBSD hat on, it should be pointed out that we had this wonderful fellow called Cameron Grant. He is largely responsible for FreeBSD's post-OSS audio system. FreeBSD could have gone several ways for audio at the time, but he made it work, and it worked well. It had virtual channels with in-kernel mixing with very low latency - with full API compatibility. Tragically, Cameron's time was cut short.
Over time, other people got involved and picked it up. The subsystem gradually progressed from the user perspective of being simple and Just Working, to something that is rather powerful today.
Indeed, the author of that comment seems to be confusing OSSv4 with Cameron Grant's newpcm, which was a separate thing. It was developed around the same time as ALSA but didn't have a new userspace API like ALSA and OSSv4 did.
> Various other Linux developers have also expressed unhappiness with deficiencies in the OSS API [3].
Wanted to see what this meant so i read the citation. I think this is what I found most relevant:
> There are two separate models that can be used between the software and the hardware. In a "push" model, the application decides when to read or write data and how much, while the "pull" model reverses that, requiring the hardware to determine when and how much I/O needs to be done. Supporting a push model requires buffering in the system to smooth over arbitrary application behavior. The pull model requires an application that can meet deadlines imposed by the hardware.
The claim is that write(2) etc. is supporting push but ill suited for pull. It's easy to do the former in terms of the latter but not the other way around.
The notion that PulseAudio's introduction wasn't highly disruptive to end users is completely ahistorical. People were pretty pissed off about it, and not because something changed under the covers in a totally seamless and trouble-free way.
I sort of felt for Lennart Poettering for all the abuse [0] he got (I guess it helped that I'd already given up on using Linux as a desktop, so it could be as broken as it wanted to be as far as I was concerned) until he inflicted systemd on the world...
"The notion that PulseAudio's introduction wasn't highly disruptive to end users is completely ahistorical."
I never said it wasn't, there were plenty of bugs in
PulseAudio. Please make sure not to argue straw men. The statement I have an issue with is claiming that disruption was caused by apps needing to be rewritten for PulseAudio, which was most likely not the case. PulseAudio even had a compatibility mode for ESD for a while, which stuck around until all the ESD code was removed from GNOME. So that particular aspect wasn't disruptive to end users, it sounds like you're talking about some other bugs.
But on that note, this complaining about bugs in PulseAudio and systemd and such is pretty boring to me because it's making a comparison to some situation that never existed. The situation with bugs and missing features in ESD, NAS and aRts was much worse than PulseAudio, and those projects are all dormant. Likewise with upstart and OpenRC.
> The statement I have an issue with is claiming that disruption was caused by apps needing to be rewritten for PulseAudio,
There's not any doubt about that. Things were broken all over the place until they were patched. It was awful.
> which was most likely not the case.
It's weird that you're writing as if this was a hypothetical period that human beings did not actually live through, such that we can only speculate about it.
XMMS supported ALSA via a plugin. XMMS was dead anyway, at that point (when ALSA arrived). It had a GTK1 interface, for example, and barely got updates. At some point, the plugin ecosystem was more alive than XMMS itself, and they extended the software a lot (think of it like Sublime Text's plugin system, or Winamp's). XMMS2 took way too long to arrive. In the meantime, better iTunes-like audio players were released, such as the ones default in GNOME and KDE.
The post also fails to mention JACK, a low latency audio server for Linux. Which is now replaced by PipeWire. JACK was programmed by the same person as Ardour, called Paul Davis. You might've seen him around here. He's been doing using Linux audio professionally for a while.
There was also a Linux live distribution aimed for being used as a Linux audio workstation, called dyne:bolic.
FreeBSD was and is a niche, not the reason why Linux wasn't used much for professional audio work.
The ALSA debacle was a short lasting transition period (eventually ALSA even got OSS emulation).
The reason why Linux wasn't used much for professional audio work goes to Apple. macOS is just easier to use than any Linux distribution, so it got the momentum in that scene (and in the artistic scene in general). The rest is history.
The commit message does not mention any MFC timeline [1] so this feature is not planned to be merged back into existing stable branches. In other words, the first release with this feature is going to be FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE.
[1]: Also, you may look for the commit hash (a40cf4175c90142442d0c6515f6c83956336699) at https://mfc.kernelnomicon.org/ to see the back-porting status.
