Am Sat, 10 Mar 2012 10:35:07 +0200 schrieb Thanasis Georgiou <sakisds.s@gmail.com>:
No it's not.
Sorry, but it is.
The developers decided they want it a part of their desktop environment and now it's a dependency.
And that's the problem and the reason, why those flame wars regularly pop up if PA is mentioned. Those dependencies are absolutely not necessary resp. if those DEs are designed to only work with PA then it's a misconception in those DEs. I do see that PA can give some additional features for some users, but those users who really need these features are the vast minority. Who really needs to move a sound gapless from an internal sound card to a USB sound card? Who really needs PA to set different volume levels for different programs? Every program I know has its own volume control. So PA may be seen as a little bit more comfortable, but it's not necessary. Just two examples. The mixing of the audio output of several programs is also not an argument for PA, because ALSA does this perfectly with its dmix by default for years. Well, meanwhile there seems to be an issue with some software not detecting an audio device anymore if another software is already playing sound. Stopping both programs and starting them in reverse order makes both programs play sound at the same time again. This seems to mostly happen with KDE/Qt-Software. But that's a different topic, and most likely a bug in either kdelibs, qt or ALSA, but installing PA is not a solution. So there may be a few users for whom PA makes sense, but not for the most people.
You obviously have problems with PA, I saw your other thread, but this doesn't mean it's useless. Have you tried reporting your problems to PA and providing data about your cards so someone can fix them?
Yes, there is a bug report about the ice1712 (envy24) audio cards in upstream's bug tracker for years. It was recently been fixed by giving a asound.conf for ALSA which cripples those (semi-)professional audio cards to simple stereo cards. I then reopened this bug, explained why this is not a solution, and never heard anything about this again. Instead the PA developers now regularly say that PA is not meant for professional users but only for consumers. This also proves that PA is not working correctly and most likely never will. And this also proves that PA should not be made as a dependency for DEs, because it is not meant for everybody. That's why I regularly say that there wouldn't be a problem if PA is only treated as a normal, and especially optional piece of software, and not as a dependency for anything. Keep in mind that most users use a stereo or maybe surround sound card like SoundBlaster or AC'97, I guess like you. I have no doubt that PA works with such sound cards. But even if probably most users use such cards those are only two cases. There are a lot of ice1712 (envy24) audio cards from the simplest ones like M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 up to the most professional ones like the RME Hammerfall which are totally not supported by PA. And if you knew those audio cards and how they are working you would agree that crippling them to stereo is really not a solution, not even a dirty workaround. I don't know how many other sound cards don't work with PA. ALSA, btw., supports every sound cards incl. those ice1712 cards out of the box, maybe in conjunction with envy24control from alsa-tools. So that the PA developer usually blame ALSA for being the reason for the PA issue is also nonsense. It's not an ALSA issue, it is a PA issue.
Maybe contact Gnome/KDE and purpose to make pulseaudio optional or at least, easy to disable?
This should indeed be done. I personally don't use GNOME or KDE so I can't file a bug report there. But I will do it for KDE or Qt as soon as I see that the current dmix issues are a KDE or Qt issue.
That said, I really like pulseaudio. It fixed every single problem I had with flash playing audio without killing everything else and the application-specific control is nice.
If you had issues with flash playing audio why didn't file a bug report to Adobe or probably ALSA? I never had any problems with the audio output of flash. Using PA is just a workaround but no fix for this issue. Application-specific volume control may be a nice gimmick but is definitely not necessary as I explained above. With that said Ralf is totally right with his explanations. Heiko