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Firefox Goes PulseAudio Only, Leaves ALSA Users With No Sound (omgubuntu.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're a Linux user who upgraded to Firefox 52 only to find that the browser no longer plays sound, you're not alone. Firefox 52 saw release last week and it makes PulseAudio a hard dependency -- meaning ALSA only desktops are no longer supported. Ubuntu uses PulseAudio by default (as most modern Linux distributions do) so the switch won't affect most -- but some Linux users and distros do prefer, for various reasons, to use ALSA, which is part of the Linux kernel. Lubuntu 16.04 LTS is one of the distros that use ALSA by default. Lubuntu users who upgraded to Firefox 52 through the regular update channel were, without warning, left with a web browser that plays no sound. Lubuntu 16.10 users are not affected as the distro switched to PulseAudio.
While I quite like PulseAudio, does it even run on anything but ALSA? And would therefore maintaining the old ALSA-only codepath in parallel not be much of an imposition?
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
"pulseaudio/systemd isnt a requirement, you can use something else if you dont like it"
--Lennart Poettering
Good people go to bed earlier.
All you need is the --enable-alsa configure option. The resulting Firefox will prefer PulseAudio if it is present, but will use pure ALSA if it is not.
It went all down hill after 3.6.
Note for people bothered by the incessant chattering of auto-play content in their browser, this could be a feature and not a bug!!
PulseAudio won. Even Slackware gave up and enables pulse audio by default.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So you equate your rather limited usecase and expectations with everyone elses needs, call them whiners, and then top it off with a nice appeal to antiquity fallacy.
Great.
Bottom line, I guess: PulseAudio in 2017 _just effin' works_.
Just effin' works? You gotta' be effin' kiddin' me.
Pulse is _barely acceptable_ if you ONLY deal with stereo.
If you're using 5.1, or better yet, 7.1, you are sooooo fucked.
1. Pulseaudio has "enable_remixing" enabled by default.
This effectively ruins stereo content when played back on surround hardware. It sends L to L, SL, BL, and C. It sends R to R, SR, BR, and C. Do you see the problem here? C=L+R.
Bonus, it will also synthesize a LFE channel for you. LFE=L+R lowpassed at 200hz.
This can be disabled in the config file. I've never seen any pulseaudio manager with an option for it.
2. ZERO of the about 40 linux games which support surround in my steam library actually work properly in 7.1. (This might be steam runtime's fault). It invents channels that don't exist in a 7.1 configuration. Instead of SL and SR, there is a Front-Left-of-Center and, Front-Right-of-Center.
If remixing is disabled, you will have no output on SL and SR. If remixing is enabled, you will have incorrect output on SL and SR (A mix of the front and rear channels).
3. If you're trying to set up 5.1 over optical SPDIF, may god have mercy on your soul. Good luck getting it to output 5.1 DTS. I was only ever able to get stereo, but I hear it's doable.
Mozilla developers planned this last year, and when watchful users objected in the related issue, Mozilla staff closed it to comments. They then pushed the system-breaking change to the world, with no mention of it in the release notes. When users whose systems were broken said so in a bug report, Mozilla closed it to comments, too.
I understand the need to minimize clutter in bug reports, but by taking away the only existing channel for users to engage with decision-makers, Mozilla is effectively sticking their fingers in their ears and telling their community to suck it up. How ironic that this was done by Mozilla's engineering community manager. How telling that his public comment invited people to email him to discuss it directly (making himself look good on record), yet he has completely ignored email messages sent to him in the days since then.
I always thought that one of the open source community's greatest strengths was our dedication to helping one another. When I write free software, and encourage people to use and depend on it in their daily lives, I take care to avoid causing unnecessary problems for them in future updates, even if their needs are different from my own. If I do cause such a problem and a bunch of them take the time to identify and report it, I see that as a sign that I made a mistake, I take responsibility for my actions, and I return their favor by spending a bit of time reworking my design.
I do this work partly for personal satisfaction in creating quality software, and partly because I don't like jerking people around, but mostly because I know that my time donated to the community is repaid indirectly, through all the contributions those people make to other open source projects. One of them might be writing the documentation for my favorite version control system, another might be using unusual hardware that exposes an OS bug that I'll need fixed next year, and others might have donated money or suggested a good design idea to projects that make my life easier in some other way. I give a little in the short term, and in return, I receive a lot in the long term.
This ecosystem of diverse and indirect contributions works amazingly well. I don't believe we would have Firefox, Chrome, MacOS (remember its Mach & BSD roots?), Android, Linux, or hundreds of thousands of other wonderful things if not for people in different situations helping one another like this.
So, when developers of a project like Firefox shut out a cross-section of the community that made their jobs possible and from whom they will almost certainly continue to benefit over time, it seems greedy to me. When they deliberately break the systems of the people whom they encouraged to depend on their software, especially when it's something so integral to daily life as the web browser, it seems irresponsible to me. And when onlookers choose disrupt the ensuing discussions by slinging useless comments like "freeloader" or "works for me" at other community members despite receiving value every day from this same community, they seem like hypocritical trolls.
I think we can do better than this. The open source community thrives on diversity and collaboration. Firefox can be replaced, but if we become another monoculture of self-absorbed know-it-alls, we all will have lost an asset of immeasurable value.
tl;dr: Dear Mozilla, you're doing it wrong.