On 29-01-2012 15:03, Norbert Zeh wrote:
As many others, I am happily running without PA and will probably be able to continue to do so for a long time because I don't even use Gnome or KDE. I just felt the need to add to the discussion because some people in this thread defend PA as the golden bullet for desktop audio use, which it absolutely isn't in my experience. If this was a result of using hardware that simply isn't supported well by linux drivers, then that would be my fault, but, as already said, plain ALSA works simply great. Throw PA into the mix, and things start to go wonky.
Currently I am also a happy pa user and I haven't experienced any of the most common problems that affected pa users, but before I had to use ossv4 because plain alsa would output crappy sound until some major driver rework landed on the kernel. I've seen a small part of both worlds and I know how frustrating it is when things don't work when and how they should, but as with most things, usually the blame isn't on one side only. I know that alsa devs and pa dev(s) already did their fair share of blame throwing, it might be a case of pa missing some important features/support or doing something that doesn't make sense but I wouldn't discard the possibility of bugs in drivers for less common cards or many workarounds/fixes still missing in drivers for really cheap and sometimes broken cards/chips/hardware implementations. Take as an example the recent problem with KDE (I think it was KDE) and open source graphics drivers. Drivers advertised support for some modernish opengl features, KDE tried to used them, but as they were never really widely used and tested there were lots of problems and in some cases the advertised support wasn't even implemented in the drivers, the only thing that was missing was software to expose the problems. Any problems and feature requests should be reported upstream, at least let the blame "brainstorming" happen at a level where it might do some good, even if the respective devs don't want to acknowledge the problems they might silently fix things or make them work better :p -- Mauro Santos