[OT] Which IDE / Editor do you use?

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Saturday, 14 September 2013 at 06:57:23 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> decided to seriously look into finding a Linux distro that I 
> could live with. I chose Debian.

I went with Slackware when I started, actually due to the 
zipslack thing, and then never looked back. You might say "well 
there's your problem" cuz slack doesn't use package managers. But 
I've spent enough time on debian and centOS that my opinion of 
package managers hasn't changed at all: nice when they work, but 
they don't most the time.

The biggest culture hit for me the first time I did use them 
though was the -devel libraries. On Slackware, all libraries are 
devel, they just do it all together. And really, why wouldn't 
you? This is linux! (and we are KLINGONS! sorry i couldnt resist)


But slackware packages are simple and to the point. They're just 
tarballs with everything you need (except recursive dependencies, 
but you usually already have them - assuming you can actually 
find a slackware package, getting rarer each year, sadly - they 
are built against the core system and tend to work well).

Still not my *ideal* system, but despite my complaining, I 
actually do like it. The biggest problem is nowadays everyone 
does deb and rpm instead.

> Windows and most of the other distros at the time offered: the 
> ability to install a bare minimum system that could still 
> function without *requiring* X11


oh god X11 was too brutally slow to use on an older computer 
anyway. Windows 95 was actually fast.

> Anyway, long story short, I found that while Linux, like any 
> other modern OS, required sacrificing some flexibility -- you 
> don't deal directly with the hardware anymore

There was vm86 mode though... I got this program DOSEmu that did 
that and it rocked. But now I'm on 64 bit.

Actually though now there's the whole qemu/kvm virtualization 
stuff who's potential I really don't think has been fully 
explored.  Not only could you run programs for other systems, but 
you could also potentially sandbox them really well, better than 
user accounts and processes alone.

> o_O What system *are* you using?? I've been using Debian's 
> default ALSA installation for the last, oh, decade?

I actually use ALSA too, but some of the programs are OSS 
emulation (which rocks btw. Ever try to program ALSA? What a 
piece of shit, oss works the way it should, just write some crap 
to /dev/dsp).

If I opt in to the alsa programs they mix sounds fine, but 
there's more latency. Not a problem sometimes, but it bugs me 
other times, and besides, like I said I think locking the audio 
device is sometimes a feature rather than a bug.

But still, it's ridiculous, they should have just fixed OSS back 
then to mix and keep up with the drivers (someone did! but they 
made it closed source so linux couldn't look at it. But the 
FreeBSD people fixed oss too.)

There are some weird system things too though. The ALSA volume 
control (alsamixer to interface with it, but it is in the system 
itself) is really weird. Most the values don't seem to do 
anything on my new hardware.

On my old motherboard, the volume control worked like you'd 
expect. Master has a wide range, PCM had a wide range, they'd 
work together.

My new motherboard is weird. PCM does virtually nothing. Master 
works well from about 20 to 80, but setting it to zero doesn't 
actually silence it (usually) and going to 100 just distorts it. 
I guess distortion is expected with digital audio maxing out, but 
my old mobo didn't do it.


Now, on the bright side, at least alsa actually works now. When I 
was doing it ten years ago, that was a huge victory.