Linus Torvalds Announcement:

It's Sunday afternoon, and this week I somehow kept my wits together
long enough to keep track of the day of the week, so the release isn't
randomly delayed. Will wonders never cease?

Anyway, nothing very special seems to have happened this last week, so
as expected the final 7.3 is out, and thus tomorrow the merge window
for 7.4 opens. Except I'm on my annual family vacation, so instead of
merging anything first thing in the morning, I'll spend most of the
day on a boat and under water. I'll get back to merging in the
afternoon, but I expect my schedule to be a bit unusual for a while.

I hope I can still complete the merge window in the usual two weeks,
but it may be that I'll end up with an extra week of merging just to
catch up.

Note that that extra week doesn't mean that I'll accept pull requests
that come in past the usual timing - the rules are still that what
gets merged should be ready before the merge window opens, not some
kind of late development during the merge window. So don't try any
shenanigans.

Below is the shortlog for the last week of 7.3 development. It looks
fairly spread out, no real pattern to it: random fixes all over.

Is it that "AI" nonsense?

Is this that release with like 200 CVEs getting fixed?

I'm not using anything 7.x or later until this tech bro ai mass hallucination is over and the code gets cleaned out.

Mark my words, they're going to get bit in the ass by this hard.

I'm not mad that he likes ai; I'm a lead engineer, and I use spec driven development a lot. The problem is that I have had a career beyond ai and can survive losing ai, where as a lot of young developers these days can't. It's like that line from the Spider-Man movie, "if you're nothing without the suit, then you don't deserve the suit". He needs to talk about using ai as a tool without losing your skills and identity as a developer.

Don't you think you're overreacting just a bit?

They are probably the same type of person still using SysVInit, ALSA and Xorg.

No.

Actually audiophiles like me use ALSA. I use it to send audio to my DAC.

Once again we are pulling up the ladder behind us. This time it's GenX.

Oooh this is gonna age like milk

Yeah I'm literally predicting that. Thanks for translating plain English to plain English.

Why is that?

ALSA is bit-acurate. Pipewire/Pulse Audio isn't. It resamples and mixes the audio so you can, for example play a YouTube video in your browser while calling your friend on Discord. When I'm using ALSA to send music to my DAC, I can't listen to anything else while using my DAC. Audiophiles want the DAC to do the audio decoding, not Pulse or Pipewire. I probably didn't explain very well but i'm not an expert.

I couldn't find the actual CVE count for 7.3 but 6.x were about 500 CVEs per release, 7.0 to 7.2 teetered towards 1000-1500 and rising.

The articles blew out suspecting 7.3 would get to 2000 but I haven't found one yet actually claiming the threshold was crossed.

I'm with him. I don't think we'll ever stop using AI so I'm pretty locked out of what tools are available to me. In an ideal world I would never interact with anything that has even been ingested by an LLM.

Got out of the industry because of it. Probably going to do line work or get into the IBEW; as of right now I can stomach OpenBSD but if it starts teetering towards LLMs I'm going with 9front as my one and only daily driver, and we're not far off from that.

This sounds like Bitstream versus PCM.

No.

Hm, I am using pipewire. Does that mean the audio send to my DAC is worth even when only one audio source is playing, so no mixing is ging in?

What app do you use to listen to music and what DAC do you have? Pipewire is still altering the audio regardless.

I am using mpd.
I do have active speakers (audioengine) with an onboard DAC. I am a low budget audiophile but not because I don't love high fidelity audio but because of a lack of budget. :)
Question is if I would be able to hear the difference between using Pipewire and Alsa with these speakers. But I am willing to try.
What do you think?
Thanks for the answer!

It depends on how perceptive you are and how revealing your equipment is. Headphones definitly makes detailed listening easier but you might still hear the diference. Nothing to lose by trying. I think mpd can output with ALSA but I'm not certain. I will say the difference is slight but I want the best sound possible so it's worth it to me. I'd recommend testing it with something dynamic with some quiet bits. Why Worry by Dire Straits is my go to. I hate the remasters but the original is so good. Anyway, feel free to reach out if you have questions or need advice from another budget audiophile. Feel free to DM too.