OT: leaf/mousepad and saved settings

[Ralf Madorf]

> KISS is a good idea, but editing text file configs scattered across
> the system is not.

I don't have access to old emails at the moment, but a Ubuntu Studio
developer had a good idea. He was willing to write an app that sets up
jackd perfectly. He did a request in jack devel mailing list. Somebody
else had the same idea before and already wrote an app. It's a venturous
enterprise that seldom ends successfully. You won't find such an app add
to any repository.
Suse ships with YaST, I don't think that YaST is very helpful, since you
aren't able to do all settings as needed. GRUB2! It fails completely,
it's not more comfortable, but a PITA.
If's impossible to have such super cow power apps for PCs. For a
computer like an Atari ST it's easy to write such apps, since the
hardware always is the same, as long as you don't own an Atari STE.

> I'm not an audio enthusiast really, but last time I tried to switch my
> n00b GStreamer + PulseAudio + ALSA setup from 44100Hz (or was it
> 48000Hz?) to 96000Hz it was such a PITA that I gave up after editing
> two config files

The problem here is the super cow power sound server pulse audio. Linux
already has got a very good sound server. This sound server has still a
lot of weak points, but those points would have been solved, if coders
would have worked on it, instead of working on pulse audio. The name of
it is jackd2. Pulse audio is pestilence.

Btw. 96KHz seldom cause a better audible sound quality than 48KHz do,
just some bad converters sound better using 96KHz and I additionally
experienced interaction to latency and MIDI jitter for my old elCheapo
sound cards, guess for my new Ferrari sound cards it's a completely
different situation.

> You can blame me for this, but I
> want at least a GUI with a sampling rate dropdown, with automatic
> on-demand sampling rate switching being a proper solution

The name of the GUI is http://qjackctl.sourceforge.net/ written by Rui,
of cause, it's written for jackd1 and jackd2.

> (just like X
> adapts to monitor resolution without me editing the goddamn xorg.conf
> and whatnot).

X is a PITA, hardware and Linux are a PITA in general, unfortunately
this is the reason why we can't have super cow power GUI apps and KISS
regarding to configs is the best solution.

I'm missing the same comfort you're missing, but I experienced that all
the times when distros try to ship with more comfort, it caused more
pain. I prefer Radio Birdman from the other side of the planet, anyway,
I need to quote Crowded House: "wherever there is comfort there is pain
only one step away"

- Ralf