Re: [gentoo-user] Re: gnome-control-center any way to configure without pulseaudio?

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Wed, 25 Jan 2012 05:24:46 -0800
walt <w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 01/24/2012 10:52 PM, covici@ccs.covici.com wrote:
> > walt <w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> >> I just scanned through the gnome-control-center code looking for
> >> clues about pulse and found no sign that pulse is voluntary.
> 
> > So what would happen if I installed pulse and just didn't
> > start the thing, what would I lose then?
> 
> I tried that and found that the gnome applet for controlling the
> volume and mixer controls won't work without pulse.  You can use some
> other app to change the volume, I suppose, but I didn't bother to try
> it.  Seems like a losing battle in the long run.  Maybe if we wait
> long enough pulse will actually become useful to ordinary everyday
> users.


Why do you say that? (Serious question, I'm not jerking your chain)

I also don't use pulse - plain ALSA is good enough for me - but looking
over the design goals for pulseaudio I see a decent attempt to deal
with audio properly for the future. These days we have computers and
devices that can interact with many other things in weird and
wonderful ways and software needs to deal with that. It's similar in a
way to the rise of desktop environments in the past - instead of a
bunch of isolated apps all doing their own thing independantly, systems
like KDE created an environment where apps interacted nicely and
all needed to plug into the same bus. Whether that goal was properly
accomplished or not is a different debate :-)

If a simpler desktop is your thing and you actually prefer *Box|XFCE or
such then you have no need of pulse audio and that's OK. I just curious
why you think that it's not useful to the ordinary user in a generic
wide way.


-- 
Alan McKinnnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com