[arch-general] PulseAudio again (was: change in mount behaviour?)

[Heiko Baums]

Am Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:29:33 +0100
schrieb Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net>:

> The majority of Linux users on non-audio Linux mailing lists praise
> PA, ...

And the most computer users use Windows. So what's the point? That
doesn't mean that Windows is better than Linux or that Windows works
perfectly.

I'm sure that most Linux users just use their stereo or maybe surround
SoundBlaster like or onboard AC'97 sound card and not a
(semi-)professional audio card.

For those people PulseAudio may work, but that doesn't mean that it
really works, because they just don't see all the flaws. And it
definitely doesn't work with those ice1712 cards. And I've seen a lot
of discussions in Linux and IT forums where PulseAudio absolutely
wasn't praised, where most users said that it is crap or at least
unnecessary, because of the missing hardware support, and because most
of the features are already done by ALSA itself out-of-the-box.

> I always had issues with PA and I never had an issue when I replaced
> PA by dummy packages, but seemingly there's a work flow by a majority
> of Linux users, where having PA installed is an advantage.
> 
> You might take a look at Debian users mailing list. On KDE4 PA is
> using 2% CPU already when doing nothing. For some people using 2% for
> nothing isn't a bug, it's ok for them.

So you see, that some people just don't care, maybe because they don't
know better. I would call those 2% buggy and a waste of resources.
Another reason not to using PulseAudio.

> Why should I trust that a musician is a good drummer, when she's a bad
> guitarist? Perhaps because she's a drummer ;).

This comparison is flawed. A guitarist wouldn't go on stage and drum,
if he can't drum, and vice versa. But Lennart writes a software for
something he at least doesn't know enough about (PulseAudio) and tries
to have this declared as standard, and at the same time writes another
software (systemd), which also has several issues or is at least not
really compatible with existing systems or script as far as I know,
instead of first fixing the first one, so that it really works. And
then he thinks he has to get involved in other things at the same time.
This is something completely different, and this is what I'm worried
about.

If he would do one thing and would really try to fix its issues and he
would really try to learn how to fix them, I wouldn't say much. But I
don't see this. So how should I trust him and his software if he gets
himself involved in several different things if he's not able to do the
one and even the other thing correctly?

Heiko