Re: Tragic State of FreeBSD Audio/Sound

From: Shawn Webb <shawn.webb_at_hardenedbsd.org>
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2026 22:55:41 UTC 
On Wed, Jul 22, 2026 at 01:18:54AM +0300, Christos Margiolis wrote:
> On Mon Jul 20, 2026 at 8:59 PM EEST, Matthew Grooms wrote:
> > On 7/20/26 12:38, vermaden wrote:
> >>>> I will not even start about PITA syntax of mixer(1) which went into
> >>>> this:
> >>>>
> >>>> % mixer -f ${DEV} vol.volume=+0.05
> >>> Just use gtk-mixer, avail in ports.
> >>>
> >>> In recent years, I haven't noticed any bugs
> >>> in the operation of the OSS.
> >> I do it by scripts anyway ... but I needed to rewrite all my scripts because of these changes ... and this change in syntax was bad from at least three perspectives:
> >>
> >> 1. It happened in 'point' release (like from .2 to .3) - not in new major release - breaking stuff for EVERYONE.
> >>
> >> 2. It happened without any reason - the tool could do the same with old syntax underneath - the new syntax does not introduce anything new - it just has different syntax.
> >>
> >> 3. As FreeBSD (at least up to some time ago) cherished the POLA principle WHY the old syntax could not been also kept and accepted?
> >>
> >> ... and yes - I also think that 'gtk-mixer' works well - so is 'dsbmixer' tool.
> >
> >
> > It offered something new to me: Confusion. In the past, I'd need to 
> > fiddle with the mixer once a year and it was more or less obvious how it 
> > worked. The last time, I just gave up.
> >
> > -Matthew
> 
> I am genuinely curious. What is so confusing, and even worse, more
> obvious with old syntax than the new, to the point that you would give
> up?

Another anecdotal data point:

I, too, was impacted by the mixer(8) syntax change. I wrote my own
volume control scripts for my i3wm environment. I found the syntax
change to be somewhat confusing, whereas the old syntax seemed the
more straightforward of the two.

I was able to adjust my script, but it definitely was an impactful
change that actually caught me somewhat off-guard at the time. Minor
annoyance, but doable for me.

Thanks,

-- 
Shawn Webb
Cofounder / Security Engineer
HardenedBSD

Signal Username:  shawn_webb.74
Tor-ified Signal: +1 (719) 756-1197 / activist_opsec.27
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