Removal of PulseAudio from Ubuntu

[Dylan McCall]

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 4:13 PM, Ryan Oram <ryan at infinityos.net> wrote:
> A great overview of the problems with PulseAudio:
> http://www.webcitation.org/5kcZfOb4l
>
> It is 2 years old, but the facts in the article above are still
> completely true. PulseAudio has made essentially zero progress in the
> last 2 years, which is why it should be abandoned.

I fail to see how diverging from upstream Gnome and switching audio
systems AGAIN would solve any problems. As it is we have gained a lot
from PulseAudio (eg: Bluetooth audio that we can actually expect end
users to use), it is quite widely adopted and it is neatly integrated
at this point.

Now, granted, most things (gstreamer, canberra) are flexible and have
(or could have) OSS4 support, but there is some significant energy
required to swap these kinds of components. I think energy would be
better spent sorting out the higher level APIs that application
developers are actually meant to be using. We seem to have hundreds of
these bouncing around, and they are all compatible with a different
subset of audio frameworks. We can change underlying systems all we
want, but those diagrams of the audio stack will still look awful
because of all those libraries.

You mention PulseAudio's high latency. I haven't followed this, but
does anyone know what became of rtkit? Personally I've had an
excellent audio experience in Lucid thus far (except for that funny
issue with the balance slider and indicator-sound) and I believe rtkit
has been merged into the kernel, but I could be mistaken about whether
it's being used (or useful to begin with).

Disclaimer: I'm also quite attached to positional event sounds :)


Dylan