Am Sat, 28 Jan 2012 12:37:14 -0600 schrieb C Anthony Risinger <anthony@xtfx.me>:
is this roughly message you want to send?
No, this is not the message, and I guess you totally misunderstood me. The problem is that PulseAudio is not working with every sound and audio card, but users are forced to install it as a dependency by some distros and/or DEs, even if it doesn't support several audio cards. And the problem is that this leads to being called PulseAudio as a standard even if it doesn't support a lot of sound and audio cards, so that sound probably wouldn't work with those cards some day. And the problem is upstream's reaction on bug reports about this, that they say something like "it's ALSA's fault that our software doesn't work with your audio card" even if ALSA supports these card perfectly out-of-the-box, etc. So to me it just sounds like "We want our software to be a standard but we just don't care about hardware we don't understand, and we just ignore it." That are the problems. Like I said before, if PulseAudio was just another piece of software which I can install or not, I totally wouldn't care about it. But as soon as someone forces me to installing this, I do care. Well, I'm currently using Arch Linux and Xfce. So I'm not, yet, forced to install it. But I'd like to keep it this way.
i think if you read a bit more ... eg. man pages, documentation, introductory blogs/etc, and not rants by random-equally-infuriated users ... you may find some reason, and *maybe* even some use. ftw, PA idles at 0% CPU for me, and when streaming over the network to an XBMC sound system, it uses a steady average 1-2% (actually brief intermittent bursts at 10% or so) ... nothing outrageous ...meanwhile, FF consumes 3-5% to run flash, and flash consumes 8-10% to run Pandora ... PA is the lightest link in the chain.
I didn't say anything about PulseAudio's CPU usage. That was someone else. I just answered that 2% CPU usage at idle time would be too much. Actually I don't know how many resources it needs. Heiko