On a more serious mode now: As the devs themselves said, pulseaudio is optional, unless you are using GNOME, which requires Pulseaudio upstream. There is nothing clearer than that. Go blame GNOME developers. There is something i noticed. Morgan Gandwere is a Debian convert... That explains a lot of things actually. Debian is known to modify every possible package, since Debian maintainers are more wise and of course they know better than upstream developers about upstream software. Debian is known to fork a package when some upstream developer does not accept a debian maintainer's POS patch. Then the package is left to rott and die, since the debian maintainer is not able to develop it. Debian users are used to this mentality. That explains why someone with this background believes that a distribution should modify upstream to fit its maintainers whims. Sometimes there have been packages i wanted that didn't make part of Arch, even though in my opinion they should. For example, libxft-lcd was in community, while lib32-libxft-lcd was not. I asked in the forum to include that too, but instead, libxft-lcd went to AUR also. I didn't bitch about it, i just use AUR and that's it. One can't expect a whole distribution to accomondate his personal needs. So pulseaudio haters, since pulseaudio is optional, the only reason you complain is that you don't want it in extra, you don't want to install libpulse since you cant afford 1MB disk space, and you also don't want media packages compiled with pulse support because of a purely theoritical bloat. Well, you can't expect the distro to remain behind the times and not include proper (optional) pulse support for these reasons. If 1 mb of disk space and tiny bits of memory bloat in executables is such a waste for you, you could recompile those packages, or even better, try Gentoo. I hear Gentoo is really fast and without bloat. After 60 hours of compiling your apps start 5ns faster. Great!