Removing Pulseaudio, and overweight DE's affects on performance

[Luke Kuhn]

In my experience, the main difficulty in removing Pulseaudio is finding a replacement volume control applet that can sit in a systray. I use qamix aa a partial substitute, in the "panel favorites" of gnome-shell with frippery on my desktops, and in the toolbar of Icewm on the laptop. This is crude but usable for me, we need to perhaps dig up the old code for gnome-volume-control from before Pulseaudio was used and get it working in current DE's. 
The other problem, as I've said before, is garbage soundcards in some laptops that cannot accept a mono input. That of course is not as big a problem for a studio-focussed distro except for users who keep the same OS on all their machines as I do, and I simply find the workarounds for the problems that produces. Has anybody tried to FIX pulseaudio so it would, say, perform as well as Jack?
About the DE's while we are on that subject: GNOME 3 , Unity, and KDE4 are all case studies in "page's Law" that software gets half as fast at the same rate processors get twice as fast. Doesn't bother my big video editing machines one bit,. but running GNOME3 on a netbook is enough to create video playback problems in Flash. Although I use IceWM instead of XFCE in my netbook (I'm used to it and like it), I can see more and more why Ubuntustudio had to dump GNOME. GNOME3 with gnome-shell-frippery does a good job at multitasking and can be used like GNOME2, but it's still heavy, maybe even more so than GNOME3 by itself. . Any time people have to push a machine to the max, that could be "one less track" as another poster put it.
As for Unity, nobody has ever written a replacement menu for it that works very well, so to use Unity you have to add a separate dock-yet another process, and if it uses opengl and you have embedded graphics on the northbridge with the memory controller on the CPU, another contributor to memory gridlock and stutter. In fact, on that type of machine, including notoriously the second generation Intel Atom, the best thing you can do to speed up the graphics is to avoid using opengl for anything but a single application that requires it, one at a time, and certainly not using any opengl desktop environment. 

 		 	   		  
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