On Thu, 2011-01-20 at 18:25 -0600, Yaro Kasear wrote:
I, personally, have never worked with him. I have seen enough criticism of Pulse Audio, for example, getting handwaved and pinned on someone else's project. I think about it logically:
If it works fine with ALSA, why did it inexplicably stop working fine with Pulse Audio running? Why, when he claims that PA not working is the fault of some distribution doing it wrong that it's busted no matter what system I try it on?
Lennart has never, in his explanations of how PA actually screws up, actually explained to my satisfaction. And with PA being as flawed as it seems to me, systemd really worries me. From my perspective he couldn't get a sound daemon written that couldn't get sound working right on my system, why am I to believe systemd would fare any better.
I've followed the pulseaudio project closely for some time, and the explanations have been technically sound. Admirably so in the face of some of the 'omg you iz brokez my sound' nonsense which was going on. For an analogy, have you followed the wine project? Most of their work consists not of emulating the published parts of the Windows API, but of emulating the broken/buggy behaviour which most apps had come to rely on. In the same way, many current audio apps came to rely on non-published bits of the Alsa API. This talk is probably a year or so out of date however. Try pulseaudio now, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. You'd also have noticed that actual bug reports on our forums/ML etc. concerning pulseaudio have dropped to close to nil.