Removal of PulseAudio from Ubuntu

[Ryan Oram]

How many users actually use Bluetooth headsets with their computers or
mute their browsers?

I feel that being able to play games without having to edit text files
or install alternate packages is much important to the average user
then the above features.

Chances are people who want to use Bluetooth headsets and to mute
browsers will know how to configure Linux to do so anyways.

Thanks,
Ryan Oram

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 8:09 PM, Dylan McCall <dylanmccall at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>