Please, Ubuntu, do not embarrass me again!

[Tom H]

On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 8:31 AM, Basil Chupin <blchupin at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> On 06/06/10 21:34, Chan Chung Hang Christopher wrote:
>>
>>> Pulseaudio is a PITA!
>>>
>>> Please, Ubuntu, do something in respect of getting sound to work "out of
>>> the box" for people who install Ubuntu.
>>>
>> But pulseaudio allows us to match the sound system of Solaris and Mac OS X!
>
> Nobody is stopping you from using pulseaudio. The problem is that it is
> installed by default and does allow the sound to work for most people
> (read the questions in this ML about people having problems with getting
> sound when installing Ubuntu).
>
> Install alsamixergui by default so that people can get to see all the
> parameters available to get sound working - which pulseaudio does not
> allow as I have already explained - and then if you want to stream or
> whatever your sound then install pulseaudio.
>
>> Why should one app hoging the sound to the exclusion of all others be a
>> defining characteristic of Linux?!
>
> Exactly. Why should a PITA app. like pulseaudio cause such hassles with
> sound for people installing Ubuntu?

I can't begin to understand why anyone would want to use pulseaudio on
OSX given how many problems it creates on Linux and how smooth the
audio experience is on a Mac (or even on Windows). I don't know what
is really meant by "match the sound system of Solaris and Mac OS X"
but it sounds like torture to me.

I wish that Linux developers would really put some effort to make
audio work out-of-the-box, to prevent all the "I have no audio" posts
on user lists. One of the reasons that I am avoiding helping family
and friends upgrade to the latest Ubuntu/Fedora versions is that I
don't want to waste time, possibly, on fixing the audio. :(

The lead developer of pulseaudio's patest project is to write an
replacement for the sysinit system (an upstart replacement). He was
also the lead developer for avahi.

There were two "fun" comments to his systemd announcement:

1. You broke networking, then sound, and now want to break boot.

2. Fix pulseaudio before you create a new sysinit.

Mean but :)