PulseAudio Creator Responds To Critics 815
Dan Jones writes "As recently discussed here, Linux sound development has come under fire for being overly complex and, more specifically, PulseAudio has been criticized for not being a 'good idea.' In a lengthy interview, PulseAudio creator Lennart Poettering has responded to the many critics of the new-generation sound server and says such complaints and criticisms about PulseAudio in some Internet forums are not really shared by the vast majority of technical people. While Poettering admits PulseAudio itself is not bug-free, he believes the majority of issues are being triggered by misbehaving drivers or applications."
This is the Sound of (Score:5, Funny)
Firrrrrsssst P Po Po sssst
Re:Useless (Score:3, Funny)
Networked audio and thin unix clients ... just what I need at home! I do hope that my netbook can stream PulseAudio to my PDA!
Who knew? (Score:5, Funny)
Lady Gaga apparently uses Linux.
Can I tell it to go away when I don't need it? (Score:5, Funny)
I disagree with the original article [blogspot.com]: ALSA is the way to go, I have drivers for all cards I've thrown at it, all applications imaginable that support ALSA work just fine for me, and no, as a OSS-to-ALSA changeover survivor, I don't want to change everything to another frigging API yet again (much less back to OSS), thank you very much. And while PulseAudio is less than perfect right now, I recognise it has uses.
But that's just that - it has uses. In its current state, I'm not using it for plain-ordinary music playing on my Debian system. I don't think it's ready enough as a common day-to-day audio routing thing. Still too many problems.
An example case: I was really disappointed when I upgraded Ubuntu on an older computer (600Mhz Pentium III with 256M memory and ESS Solo 1 onboard audio, plenty good enough for OpenOffice.org and web browsing, even ran Compiz at very good performance on GeForce 2 MX =) and sound playback started to just plain suck, when it previously worked just fine with straight-up app-to-ALSA playback. The machine just wasn't fast enough to route stuff through an application, plain and simple. And now Ubuntu foisted PulseAudio in. Uninstall PulseAudio = uninstall entire frigging GNOME desktop. I kept trying to tell it "no, I just want ALSA playback" in sound settings. No dice, pulseaudio kept respawning and hogging audio device all to itself. I kept disabling shit from all places imaginable. No dice, pulseaudio kept respawning. Now, I'm going insane (an unrelated story). I'll be armed with GCC and some dummy binaries. Mheheh. Muahaha. MUAHAHAHAHA. ...any better ideas?
Re:This is the Sound of (Score:5, Funny)
This is the only situation that anyone says: "If it has Pulse... its dead"
I have a shorter guide (Score:4, Funny)
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578 [ubuntuforums.org]
TL;DR. Here's a slightly shorter guide to a great pulseaudio setup on Ubuntu:
apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio
In my experience it works flawlessly ;-)
Re:Why is OSS no longer in the kernel? (Score:3, Funny)
Sorry, I still don't get it. They've been building OSS4 for years, it seems a good tool for the job, and yet it cannot be included in the kernel or distributed by various distros ? If they add trouble understanding GPL 5 years ago, ok, but isn't there any communication between 4front and the rest of the community on the subject. Weird.
Kind of like if you went to synagogue regularly, became part of the local Jewish community, and then went in one day wearing a Swastika armband and started screaming about how you'd sue them for slander if they kept insisting that the holocaust happened. /Godwin
OK, so maybe not exactly the same, but they were a part of a community that places a high value on ideas like openness and trust, and then they pissed all over that. Now no one wants anything to do with them because it's simply not worth getting sued over it, especially when users can just install it themselves if they care so much. I know I couldn't afford a lawsuit with these folks.
Re:Programming in general, is a lost art for Linux (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Programming in general, is a lost art for Linux (Score:1, Funny)
Unbelievably, after that entire post full of insults and put-downs, you haven't even made a single technical point.
Sometimes I wish we could go back to the slashdot 10 years ago where we actually had meaningful technical discussions, rather than pointless subjective rants.
Re:This is the Sound of (Score:5, Funny)
You were making a good point until you resorted to profanity, which shot you right down from the sky. Such a shame.
I think you accidentally switched on the grown-up internets today. Sometimes the people use the bad words there. It'll be OK.
Re:This is the Sound of (Score:3, Funny)
Oh my gosh. *looks around* I didn't realize we were in church.
Thanks for the tip, Pastor.
Re:Programming in general, is a lost art for Linux (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Programming in general, is a lost art for Linux (Score:3, Funny)
After reading your comment I don't know which BSD Desktop Environment I should look at to see comparable code that is higher quality
Enlightenment is BSD licensed. That wouldn't be a bad place to start.
I've already spoken numerous times about GConf, as a major element; about how I can't (as one example) install Firefox without installing GConf and all of its' subsequent dependencies, because I'm not able to specify a GTK theme via dotfiles any more. There are also reports now of GNOME, on Ubuntu at least, beginning to emulate the famed winrot or registry creep effect that we all knew and loved so much with Windows.
Then, just for shits and giggles, let's list a suggested build order for Gnome 2.6.
* libxml2
* libxslt
* gtk-doc
* glib2
* libIDL
* ORBit2
* intltool
* libbonobo
* fontconfig
* Render
* Xrender
* Xft
* pango
* atk
* shared-mime-info - download
* gtk+
* gconf
* gnome-mime-data
* gnome-vfs
* esound
* libgnome
* libart_lgpl
* libglade
* libgnomecanvas
* libbonoboui
* hicolor-icon-theme - download
* gnome-icon-theme
* gnome-keyring
* libgnomeui
* startup-notification
* gtk-engines
* gnome-themes
* scrollkeeper
* gnome-desktop
* libwnck
* gnome-panel
* gnome-session
* vte
* gnome-terminal
* libgtop
* gail
* libgail
* libxklavier
* gnome-applets
* metacity
* libgsf
* libcroco
* librsvg
* eel
* gstreamer (make sure you have libraries for any audio codecs you plan to use isntalled)
* gst-plugins
* nautilus
* control-center
* libgnomeprint
* libgnomeprintui
* gtkhtml2
* libgtkhtml
* yelp
* bug-buddy
* gtksourceview
* gedit
* eog
* ggv
* file-roller
* gconf-editor
* gnome-utils
* gal
* gnome-system-monitor
* gnome-media
* nautilus-media
* gnome-netstatus
* gcalctool
* gpdf