Re: [gentoo-user] Skype now will only work with pulseaudio?

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 12:53 PM, Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com> wrote:
> The skype website says that alsa is no longer supported without pulseaudio in
> their freshly cut Microsoft-owned code.  Why is then the pulseaudio flag
> provided in portage, if without audio skype would lose its core functionality
> - i.e. making voice calls?  I guess someone may only use it for IM chat, but
> that I would think is an edge use case.

I imagine that is the answer.  If they give the option to disable it,
then Gentoo is likely to provide it, since we live for edge use cases.
:)

>
> it seems awfully complicated to me, for something which for my purposes would
> be just a new 'alsamixer'. :p

It certainly is.  One of these days I'll get around to migrating to
it.  For the simple case of one sound device with one application
playing at a time alsa works just fine.  Where it breaks down is when
you have three sound devices and four applications using them, and you
want to plug in a USB headset and have it just "do the right thing."
That isn't all that uncommon a scenario on the desktop (I use a USB
headset for work on a Windows laptop all the time).  Once you build
all the framework to make that work, then it makes sense to just use
it for everything, which is why Pulseaudio has basically taken over
the Linux desktop.

Rich