Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

'evening, Mark.

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 11:41:01PM +0800, Mark David Dumlao wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 8:05 PM, Yuri K. Shatroff <yks-uno@yandex.ru> wrote:
> > In the end, I humbly believe it's up to me to judge what effect there is for
> > me on my computers.

> Yes, that's exactly the point. Scroll up and reread this thread,
> though, and you'll get the impression that some complainers seem to
> think that Lennart is breaking into their systems and magickally
> installing his 175-year old software in them. What's this about 100%
> of the users being "forced" to have pulseaudio in?

Somebody reported that pulseaudio is an absolute requirement for Gnome
>=3.8.  That may not be 100% of users, but the "forced" is certainly
there.

> And don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about here. If
> somewhere up there we're talking about "enforced" choices we're not
> talking about gentoo, we're talking about stuff like Fedora or Ubuntu
> and even "enforced" is a stretch as you could always go with a
> minimal, alternate, or a forked desktop. And it's pretty obvious why
> they thought it was sane for pulse to be a default choice.

There's a difference between a "default choice" and an absolute
requirement.

> Basically there's a bunch of vague criticisms of unnamed systems where
> "they" force stuff on "all users" for "no good reason". Nevermind that
> we can actually state what the reasons are. Fingers in the ears.
> neener neener.

Please feel free to state those reasons, which as far as I can see,
nobody has done yet in this thread; "they" being the gnome team, and the
reasons being for the forcing, not for a non-existent "default choice".

> Well I have a better theory, "they" made choices for "defaults-using
> users" that "you can totally undo" for "pretty decent reasons" but
> "some of us" just want to "feel better" about the "choices" we made by
> "pointing and laughing" at the ones we didn't. Even when we know so
> "much" about the topic that someone actually has to tell us what a
> "sound server" is or what its "use cases" are and our "use patterns"
> involve typing things in a black box so that pretty text scrolls
> quickly and makes us "feel smart" whereas the use patterns of the
> average user, uh... "don't".

It was me that started this thread, and me that needed that info.  Why
do you have to be so disparaging about the process of learning?

> It's a sane idea for a desktop distro to include pulse as a -default-.
> No, seriously, it is. Just, frigging bluetooth headsets.

Do you frig bluetooth headsets?  Can't say I do.

> And per-application volume control. Are there other ways to go about
> it?  Yeah. It remains to be seen how any of them are an order of
> magnitude better than pulse. You don't -like- it? Fine. There's no
> point in going on on some tirade about how the poor, oppressed 99% of
> users could have been doing just fine with ALSA just like you have
> with your more beautiful, hand-crafted system...

Yes, I took pulse out of my beautiful system.  As it turns out, it
hasn't (?completely) solved the problem of loosing the last few hundred
milliseconds of audio downloads.  But at least from now on, that's one
fewer possible source of problems on my system.

> --

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).