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

[Heiko Baums]

Am Sat, 28 Jan 2012 12:37:14 -0600
schrieb C Anthony Risinger <anthony at 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