Intro My 10 years old laptop has basically touch and look sensitive connectors, audio jack included. This means that the headphones plugged status is changed at random and with default settings in PulseAudio and PipeWire it will cause constant switching to speakers and I will be unable to enjoy my music (the soundcard is not great but the USB hub is also out of question since USB ports are also often touch sensitive).

Shortly this post is inspired by a Lukes video when he rumbles about todays search engines. https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/search-engines-are-totally-useless:c Most of the things I search on the web are related to the similar things over and over againg. So the results I get are almost always to the same handful of websites over and over again. Since my interest often lies in computers, programming and linux I truly get just handful of sites for my searches. A short example can be StachExchange, StackOverflow, language manuals or documentation, Archwiki pages and from time to time some other site (but this is very rare).

After reading an article on Drews blog about visurf which is based on Netsurf and his encouragement to make more sites compatible with this light browser I decided to take a look at my little blog and found the horrible state it was in. By looking at my blog from the perspective of the modern web it looked minimal and nice, but on the inside the theme I decided to base my blog on was using pretty modern styles a features which I had to get rid of.

When I got a new computer a while ago I installed PulseAudio (PA) on it since I wanted to comfortably use USB headset and switching between it and my system soundcard. PA worked somehow fine but there where some problems with my favourite music player (Music On Console) but it could be to some degree mitigated with a patch. Later Archlinux pushed PipeWire as hard dependency of few packages I had installed (namely kwin and PulseEffects). I can remove kwin safely since I do not use KDE/Plasma and had it for testing and as a backup, but it is really a pity that PulseEffects would be gone since it is great program to play with audio effects on the fly. So switching back to pulse would get rid me of these nice programs (unless I hack the packages which is another work, so why to bother?). The other huge issue with PipeWire is that it has some problems with playing audio. When I start playing (or seek) some video it plays noise for a while until it catches up with something which is pain since PipeWire was advertised to me as a drop-in replacement for PA but it sucks even more.

In mt opinion systemd is a huge pain. SystemD in my eyes is a tool developed by corporation (RedHat) for other corporations (their customers). RedHat guys (and other kinds) have many things (tools, configs, manuals, trainings, webinars…) prepared for it and thus it would be pain for them to stop using it. Other corporations like it because it has support from other corporation which they can call when there is a problem and it is mostly one package which contains almost all basic stuff they will need. I see this as major selling point for it since huge corporations do not wish to play with small things, for them it is better to spend more money and buy something. In other words, it can give a lot of people work and thus a good livelihood.