Bend in the Weather

Ever wondered why PulseAudio sucks so bad?

Sick of the multiple Audio stacks in Linux? (OSS/ALSA/PulseAudio).
Ever wanted to make sense of items like JACK,ESD,aRts and NAS or just confused with either GStreamer or xine?

Here is a clever overview of the sound systems that is Linux. (click the image for a larger view)/

Linux audio like it or not is a mess. Multiple layers providing the same functionality. It's a house of cards that often falls down.
Things have been hidden well in OSS/ALSA and it's not until demanding audio like HD codecs have started to make their way across that some of these issues are starting to be uncovered (the infamous 'popping' sounds).

PulseAudio has been poking and pushing ALSA in recent times, and as a result unearthed a number of issues.

I'm hopefully eventually we'll get to a single, simple but powerful audio stack. I'm not holding my breath though.

One thing Linux often gets bashed about is 'the fonts look crap', or something similar.

True, it's hard to deny, most distros ship their distro without enabling certain features to give you great looking fonts. (Basically to avoid patent issues).

Having said that, there is no issue with users deciding what's best for them.

I recently read a blog post describing how to get those nice crisp clean fonts that we all would like. That in turn lead to this excellent post, that has a great ~/.fonts.conf file if you like the look of those silky smooth Apple OSX fonts. (In fact some people think these settings make Linux fonts appear even better than OSX! -- ymmv)

Take a look at his example screenshots, comparing Windows (no AntiAliasing), MacOSX, and Linux -- and you decide.

I turned it on Thursday night, and it's been refreshingly crisp and clean. Well worth a look.

I'd be interested to know what other options people are setting and what they've discovered to get the 'wow' factor out of their fonts.

Some great background reading can be found on the font-config website, and in particular the fonts-conf User Manual.