+1 for no userspace daemon

I must say I have to agree. All those daemons solve a ton of problems I never experienced. Well, I guess I'm just old school...

arts and esd, well, skipping isn't a good description of the problems *I*
encountered with those. It was more 'no sound at all because it
spontaneously crashed' for arts, and 'no sound at all because of a
ludicrous and dysfunctional nonauthentication system' for esd.

Thankfully pulseaudio isn't a pile of crap like arts or esd and so doesn't
have any of those problems that I can see. :)

(Among other things PA runs at realtime priority so that it won't skip
just because of CPU load: if you're swapping so hard that its being
swapped out is problematic, I doubt that whatever was playing the music is
going to be in memory much longer either.)

Whether audio is handled by a userspace daemon or not is just a technical detail. It shouldn't have any influence on the user interface.

You learned to accept that X11 runs in userspace. PA does for audio was X does for displays. So why is it so difficult to accept PA for audio too?

Also, MS is proud of Vista's userspace sound system. And Apple about CoreAudio. So, we now do something similar on Linux, for similar reasons. That's all.

Lennart

You're being contradictory. You want less crap competing for sound output
priority and want glitch-free playback... so you want to go back to a bunch
of applications doing piss-poor direct access to ALSA and/or using the
crappy low-quality dmix mixer that can pretty easily introduce stuttering
and glitches under even remotely heavy load.

You act as if audio on Linux was all peachy and perfect until PA came
along. That's bullshit. It's been horrendous and barely usable all along.
It worked in some situations with moderate quality if you were lucky and
had the right drivers and only used the right applications. PA glitch-free
playback combined with quality mixing offers to finally make audio bearable
for the first time for _everyone_. Once the bugs are worked out of the
audio drivers, applications, and PA itself.

It's a hell of a lot closer to being realized that acceptable graphics
driver or wireless behavior on Linux, I'll tell you that much. In 10 years
of using Linux on mainstream hardware I've yet to have a video card that
works worth a crap without binary blobs, and this laptop here is the first
one I've ever been able to get wireless to work... and it requires hoops to
be jumped through (Broadcom). The problems people are having with audio
are _nothing_ in comparison, but I don't see you bitching about the
constant work being put into X/DRI or the wireless drivers and telling the
devs that they should switch back to the old way (what, plain VESA?
nothing?) because the new stuff is still buggy and incomplete (I don't even
want to get into how much time I spend trying to get video to work on both
old and new video cards -- and sometimes monitors -- compared to audio).

You don't and won't get that without a solid mixing daemon. Keep in
mind that kernel-space can't do floating point math and that reality is not
so great for the quality and performance of sound remixing and resampling.

Let me break this down for you. The software has bugs (that software being
PA, the ALSA drivers, and your user-space applications -- all of them, not
just PA), you have hit the bugs, and you're just short-fused enough to
think that said bugs invalidate the entire model. Wise people instead just
think that the bugs need to be fixed so we can solve the problems that the
old model has already proven incapable of solving.

Maybe PA got pushed into Fedora a little too early. I won't disagree with
that. I had a lot of pain with Fedora 8, too.

Do NOT be stupid and think that "Fedora pushed it too early" is the same as
"the whole model is broken."

Same here... with the possible exception of jack - but even then, I can't help but wonder whether the Unix "everything is an entirely passive file" is quite the thing for audio. No problem at all with "everything is a file", but why not say "every file can be opened with either a passive interface or a stream/callback interface"? Wouldn't make much difference for files which are blocks of disk, true, which is why having both is nice - but the stream/callback paradigm is more or less perfect for pipes; after all, it's more or less how they work anyway... and since that's the model jackd presents to its applications, wouldn't the need for it would more or less go away altogether?