I went to see The Queers last night in concert. It was a decent show, and TA80 was there from Tucson (a great bunch, BTW), as well as The Leftovers (from Maine; also a cool bunch).

I was somewhat disappointed with the show because I didn't realize until I got to the show that this was a "pop-punk" tour, and they were only going to play songs in that vein. Now granted, most of their songs fall into that category, but it just doesn't feel like much of a show without playing "You're Tripping" or the other stuff. I guess it's my own fault for missing them last June when they came through.

I also feel the need to elaborate on some of my previous comments, specifically about my discontent with the state of Linux development. What's been pushing my discontent is the fact that while Linux has gained many features and hardware support, some things that I have taken for granted just don't work correctly anymore. For me, the big thing was audio...I switched to running Ubuntu a little over a year ago, and audio has been dreadful ever since. It turns out that Pulseaudio is the big culprit; as I understand it, Fedora Core has had some similar problems.

Here's the deal; why make the switch to Pulseaudio to begin with? Didn't esound do pretty much the same thing? I'm just of the opinion that if something isn't broken, don't fix it. To be honest, OSS audio was just fine for my needs. ALSA came out, and that seems to work OK. As a musician, I've had some interest in Jack, because it seems like it'll make things like effects loops and multitrack stuff easier to do on Linux.

I just don't see a compelling reason to change things up on light pretenses. Fedora Core does this, and I'm OK with that, because that's sort of their stated mission as I understand it: i.e. to be a cooker for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Ubuntu is a different story, especially with the LTR releases. If a package turns out to be troublesome, then by god, get it fixed or remove it.

I couldn't really put my finger on what has been going wrong, until I watched this video of Theo De Raadt talking about the OpenBSD release process. Now, Theo can be kind of an intimidating and pedantic sort of guy, but he is absolutely the right kind of figure to have managing a software release process, because, he can almost always guarantee that his software releases will work, within the constraints that the team has set for the release. This is why OpenBSD comes with a relatively small set of packages. I also feel like the ports system is the right way to go. I think that Theo correctly identifies some major problems with the current Linux and X.org development models, and also highlights why OpenBSD has stayed on track.