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PulseAudio Creator Responds To Critics
Dan Jones writes "As recently discussed here, Linux sound development has come under fire for being overly complex and, more specifically, PulseAudio has been criticized for not being a 'good idea.' In a lengthy interview, PulseAudio creator Lennart Poettering has responded to the many critics of the new-generation sound server and says such complaints and criticisms about PulseAudio in some Internet forums are not really shared by the vast majority of technical people. While Poettering admits PulseAudio itself is not bug-free, he believes the majority of issues are being triggered by misbehaving drivers or applications."
Firrrrrsssst P Po Po sssst
Networked audio and thin unix clients ... just what I need at home! I do hope that my netbook can stream PulseAudio to my PDA!
Lady Gaga apparently uses Linux.
Breakfast served all day!
I disagree with the original article: ALSA is the way to go, I have drivers for all cards I've thrown at it, all applications imaginable that support ALSA work just fine for me, and no, as a OSS-to-ALSA changeover survivor, I don't want to change everything to another frigging API yet again (much less back to OSS), thank you very much. And while PulseAudio is less than perfect right now, I recognise it has uses.
But that's just that - it has uses. In its current state, I'm not using it for plain-ordinary music playing on my Debian system. I don't think it's ready enough as a common day-to-day audio routing thing. Still too many problems.
An example case: I was really disappointed when I upgraded Ubuntu on an older computer (600Mhz Pentium III with 256M memory and ESS Solo 1 onboard audio, plenty good enough for OpenOffice.org and web browsing, even ran Compiz at very good performance on GeForce 2 MX =) and sound playback started to just plain suck, when it previously worked just fine with straight-up app-to-ALSA playback. The machine just wasn't fast enough to route stuff through an application, plain and simple. And now Ubuntu foisted PulseAudio in. Uninstall PulseAudio = uninstall entire frigging GNOME desktop. I kept trying to tell it "no, I just want ALSA playback" in sound settings. No dice, pulseaudio kept respawning and hogging audio device all to itself. I kept disabling shit from all places imaginable. No dice, pulseaudio kept respawning. Now, I'm going insane (an unrelated story). I'll be armed with GCC and some dummy binaries. Mheheh. Muahaha. MUAHAHAHAHA. ...any better ideas?
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578
TL;DR. Here's a slightly shorter guide to a great pulseaudio setup on Ubuntu:
apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio
In my experience it works flawlessly ;-)
Sorry, I still don't get it. They've been building OSS4 for years, it seems a good tool for the job, and yet it cannot be included in the kernel or distributed by various distros ? If they add trouble understanding GPL 5 years ago, ok, but isn't there any communication between 4front and the rest of the community on the subject. Weird.
Kind of like if you went to synagogue regularly, became part of the local Jewish community, and then went in one day wearing a Swastika armband and started screaming about how you'd sue them for slander if they kept insisting that the holocaust happened. /Godwin
OK, so maybe not exactly the same, but they were a part of a community that places a high value on ideas like openness and trust, and then they pissed all over that. Now no one wants anything to do with them because it's simply not worth getting sued over it, especially when users can just install it themselves if they care so much. I know I couldn't afford a lawsuit with these folks.
Be smart, help people!
Wow, you managed to hate on Alsa, Linux, Gnome, C++ and the End User all in one post. Condolulations, this may be the most faddish post I've ever seen.
Unbelievably, after that entire post full of insults and put-downs, you haven't even made a single technical point.
Sometimes I wish we could go back to the slashdot 10 years ago where we actually had meaningful technical discussions, rather than pointless subjective rants.
You know, maybe you have a point. Asshole.
[FUCK BETA]
After reading your comment I don't know which BSD Desktop Environment I should look at to see comparable code that is higher quality
Enlightenment is BSD licensed. That wouldn't be a bad place to start.
I've already spoken numerous times about GConf, as a major element; about how I can't (as one example) install Firefox without installing GConf and all of its' subsequent dependencies, because I'm not able to specify a GTK theme via dotfiles any more. There are also reports now of GNOME, on Ubuntu at least, beginning to emulate the famed winrot or registry creep effect that we all knew and loved so much with Windows.
Then, just for shits and giggles, let's list a suggested build order for Gnome 2.6.
* libxml2
* libxslt
* gtk-doc
* glib2
* libIDL
* ORBit2
* intltool
* libbonobo
* fontconfig
* Render
* Xrender
* Xft
* pango
* atk
* shared-mime-info - download
* gtk+
* gconf
* gnome-mime-data
* gnome-vfs
* esound
* libgnome
* libart_lgpl
* libglade
* libgnomecanvas
* libbonoboui
* hicolor-icon-theme - download
* gnome-icon-theme
* gnome-keyring
* libgnomeui
* startup-notification
* gtk-engines
* gnome-themes
* scrollkeeper
* gnome-desktop
* libwnck
* gnome-panel
* gnome-session
* vte
* gnome-terminal
* libgtop
* gail
* libgail
* libxklavier
* gnome-applets
* metacity
* libgsf
* libcroco
* librsvg
* eel
* gstreamer (make sure you have libraries for any audio codecs you plan to use isntalled)
* gst-plugins
* nautilus
* control-center
* libgnomeprint
* libgnomeprintui
* gtkhtml2
* libgtkhtml
* yelp
* bug-buddy
* gtksourceview
* gedit
* eog
* ggv
* file-roller
* gconf-editor
* gnome-utils
* gal
* gnome-system-monitor
* gnome-media
* nautilus-media
* gnome-netstatus
* gcalctool
* gpdf