Re: Pulseaudio

["Ronald S. Bultje" <rbultje ronald bitfreak net>]

Hi,

On 10/10/07, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro wrote:

I tried and I'm still not convinced.  Unless there are some special
kernel patches in fedora making a big difference, I still hate sound
routed through a userspace daemon.  I would willingly tolerate it for
sound coming from network applications, but it's not a price I want to
pay for simple local applications when I don't care about PNP or network
sound.

And bingo, thanks for voicing this so clearly.

Daemons for sound routing are not just suboptimal, they are wrong. We have better ways (at least on Linux) nowadays. Any solution based on the idea of a userspace daemon is wrong. Not just suboptimal (which is unacceptable, because ALSA directly is - for Linux users - very much so optimal, and that's 90% of your userbase), not just "still somewhat acceptable" (because it isn't, we've ditched esound for that very reason) and definitely not "required because a small subgroup of your user population needs it" (crippling for the sake of network users - yeah right).

Userspace daemons are out. Think of a better solution. Sorry PA devs, you've got some very nifty technology in there, the per-app volume control (which GNOME had a SoC project for, what happened to that?) is very cool and should definitely go in, sound caching is definitely needed, but this is just the wrong solution in the end. Those technologies should go in in some other way, the right[tm] way, and a sound daemon just isn't that. A sound daemon is the right solution _only_ for networked audio. Most GNOME users just don't use networked audio.

Here's an alternative, crazy idea that some may consider, just for the sake of the argument. If Linux really is 90% of our userbase, which it most likely is, and people are doing all this effort to make sound daemons with configurable backends and all that, then why not just shift focus and add an OSS backend to ALSA such that it works on Solaris, BSDs etc, and then use ALSA directly? you will say no, but no consider the reverse argument of PA again. It's just as silly.

Ronald