Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Aug 26, 2010 16:47 UTC (Thu) by leoc (guest, #39773)
In reply to: Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage by niner
Parent article: Systemd and Fedora 14

Same here. I think the issue with PulseAudio is that of all change: the people who have no problems don't say anything, while the people who do proclaim far and wide that the world is ending.

Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Aug 26, 2010 17:42 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (4 responses)

"Change" is one thing. "Breaking existing setups without providing an escape route" is a bit different. The problem with PulseAudio is not so much that it doesn't work on all systems as that it's so intimately embedded into the desktop that you can't easily disable it on systems where it doesn't work.

Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Aug 26, 2010 23:47 UTC (Thu) by bangert (subscriber, #28342) [Link] (3 responses)

the solution to a broken pulseaudio is not too turn it off then, but to fix the issue instead. it appears the problem is not pulseaudio but your audio driver, ie. you are barking up the wrong tree...

the reason why pulseaudio cant use your sound hardware is because it does way more than you ever have. this is the good thing and at the same time the reason why your desktop has started to depend on it so much.

Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Aug 27, 2010 0:40 UTC (Fri) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (2 responses)

In my particular case, I believe I am barking up the right tree:-) The issues I have seen with PA do not involve problems with communication between PA and the hardware, they involve communication between PA and specific application programs (and/or several intervening layers like phonon or gstreamer). Earlier versions also had a recurring habit of chewing up gobs of CPU time for no apparent reason, but thankfully that seems to have been fixed.

I can comprehend the viewpoint that these (usually older) applications are obsolete and can be replaced by newer equivalents. But this is exactly the viewpoint that worries me, and I'm clearly not the only one. There had better be some compelling advantage to switching to a new component, be it PA or systemd, to justify the disadvantage of breaking the applications people are currently using. I hasten to add that I have no opinion on systemd yet, but certainly PA fails this test.

It's all very well to say that PA "does way more", but that "way more" is stuff that I never wanted in the first place. The capability of doing things I don't want does not compensate for doing a bad job at handling the things I use every day. I'll shut up now, because gripes about PulseAudio are relevant to systemd only to the extent they are examples of what can happen when the goals of the developer diverge from the goals of the end user.

Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Aug 27, 2010 9:26 UTC (Fri) by bangert (subscriber, #28342) [Link] (1 responses)

is this your argument: do you want all of us to remain in the audio stoneage, because you use programs that are even older than that?

this is insane.

you can't require that lennart (or whoever wants to move things forward) stays backwards compatible with each and every use case in existance. with the amount of code being produced every single day, that would make progress impossible. just as new code is written, old code dies.

and, given most of the code we use is open, you are free to update any left behind component, if you so wish.

man, would i love it if somebody would modernize/update xfig ;-)

Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Sep 3, 2010 18:21 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

you can't require that lennart (or whoever wants to move things forward) stays backwards compatible with each and every use case in existance.

The scary thing about pulseaudio is that modulo broken hardware, broken kernels (both alas common), or people doing things that just can't be virtualized in userspace (there are a few such with OSS and they break with aoss too, only ALSA's in-kernel OSS emulation helps), pulseaudio really does support almost everything. If there's a network protocol out there used for sound servers in more than a handful of boxes, PA seems to support it, and it's sufficiently modular that adding more is pretty easy.

Some questions that do 3d6 fire damage

Posted Aug 26, 2010 21:24 UTC (Thu) by ofeeley (guest, #36105) [Link]

PulseAudio has been a boon for me too. I found messing around with sound a complete pain for my simple needs which included occasionally plugging in/out a USB headset for VOIP. Works perfectly on 4 disparate desktops thanks to PulseAudio.

I suspect that the people raging about this are those that have a high level of expertise in audio configuration pre-PulseAudio and are understandably miffed that their investment is somewhat wasted now.