good points

Posted Apr 6, 2016 8:54 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
In reply to: good points by seyman
Parent article: Ubuntu on Windows

So you know better than me what worked on my system and what didn't. And I do remember that many people had the same experience, see e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug...

good points

Posted Apr 6, 2016 11:16 UTC (Wed) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

Sure, the defaults were broken, but broken defaults is a fact of life in Linux distros, especially around that time period which was particularly turbulent. PA wasn't required though, nor even hard to remove; you could always just uninstall it and get sound back - I know that's what I did after every update for a couple of years.

I do feel your pain though - the nightmare year of 2008 was when I started my transition to using Windows on the desktop. PA still wasn't production-ready by the time I'd switched full-time.

good points

Posted Apr 6, 2016 12:07 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I used Fedora 9 from its Alpha stage (KDE4 was at 4.0.3) and it was (one of, if not the) the first to include PulseAudio. Things were…rough, but it went well enough (was helping the KDE SIG at the time). By Fedora 10 and almost certainly 11, I had stopped having PA issues (well except flat-volumes, but that is an easy fix). However, Ubuntu continued having systemic problems for up to 18 months afterwards. Whether it was due to older kernels not shipping with the driver fixes, older ALSA libraries not getting the bridging right, problems with the default configurations, whatever, I don't know for sure, but as far as I can tell, most of people's problems were the result of Ubuntu botching it up on their end; Fedora showed that the right pieces were available, maybe just not according to Ubuntu's update policies (but no, can't fix things because the new release contains an unacceptable version bump nevermind it might fix 100 bugs in the process).

These days, I keep an instance of mpv streaming music whenever I'm at work and if I need to start using the webcam, start to watch another video, listen to other audio files, I just mute the stream and start the other program. No audio device locking problems, I can reroute audio while programs are running, and none of the problems people complain about today from their experiences 5+ years ago.