I'm few weeks late to join this discussion but anyway I'd like to share a
bit of my experience with pulseaudio...
On Sat, 15 Feb 2014 21:52:24 John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> The problem is that many people who complain about PulseAudio issues
> are often prejudiced about it in the first place
IMHO it's hard to acquire negative bias towards something without
experience. For instance I didn't know about pulseaudio until it broke my
audio configuration after accidental installation by dependency.
For years my audio just worked with ALSA on KDE. One day after reboot I
found that my 5.1 speaker configuration somehow reverted to "stereo". I
rarely reboot so I accumulated package upgrades for weeks or even months. I
started to check mixer (kmix), Phonon audio backend, rolled back some
packages, re-installed ALSA while logging off and on every time. Of course
nothing worked. Many hours (if not days) later I found that merely presence
of "pulseaudio" causing that devastating effect. Then for hours I tried to
configure pulseaudio for 5.1 speaker configuration and failed miserably not
being able to figure out how to adjust speakers volume by channel and not
all together. (With 5.1 speakers it may be handy to raise volume of central
speaker to hear speech clearly while making front speakers quieter; rear
speaker may be too quiet if you're far away from them etc.). You can blame
me for obvious ignorance but I gave up back then after spending too much
time on this.
Another unpleasant situation that I had with pulseaudio happened on one of
the hp/compaq (or dell) boxes that are so common in Australia. Pulseaudio
played everything through little speaker integrated to computer case while
headphone output remained silent. Again (withing reasonable time frame) I
failed to find solution to this problem with pulseaudio while ALSA/kmix
allowed me to configure audio in seconds.
Just few weeks ago on up-to-date Debian "testing" I tried installing
pulseaudio (in hope that situation improved) only to notice that it made
audio lagging and crackly. Guilty as charged, once again I had no patience
to troubleshooting pulseaudio so I just uninstalled it to continue enjoying
smooth audio experience as it was before pulseaudio.
All three incidents occurred on computers with integrated Intel audio
controller(s) which seems to be the most commonly used ones.
The above experiences did not put me to pulseaudio fan club. I'm sure
pulseaudio was developed to address some problems (that I did not
experience) and quite frankly ability to play audio over the network is
awesome.
But still as far as I'm aware pulseaudio is the only package that
often delivers misfeature and makes audio configuration unnecessary
complicated not to mention that it adds extra CPU overhead. Typically
pulseaudio installed without tools like "pavucontrol" or "pasystray" which
makes its configuration difficult. Finally IMHO lack of information like
introduction to pulseaudio and hints to related software in
"/usr/share/doc/pulseaudio/README.Debian" makes pulseaudio quite hostile to
users without prior experience.
It would be nice if pulseaudio (just) worked for everyone but we're not even
close to that.
> such that they aren't
> actually interested in having the problem fixed but rather just want
> to get rid of it and uninstall it. Trying to debug the problem in such
> cases is very difficult.
I found it hard to define the problem with pulseaudio. Invasive behaviour
or lack of prompt about system-wide audio backend takeover or disappeared
hardware mixer or lack of intro (hints) in README.Debian or need for
additional software which is not installed by default (any/all of the
above)...
It is easy to report bugs for packages that you want/need or
understand how they should work. I can't blame those who don't need
pulseaudio for not reporting bugs...
> > And to the extent that Debian users are unhappy with pulseaudio as a
> > default, it's because others have been trying to blame the user for the
> > problems instead of constructively engaging to *fix* pulseaudio.
>
> I think the reservations are mutual. If your attention as a user is
> "I'm too lazy to take a second to look into how PulseAudio actually
> works and what box I have to check.", you can't expect us on the
> other side to be happy to help as well.
That's not laziness or even lack of curiosity. If "pulseaudio" ate a lot of
your time that you spent trying to fix your (previously working) audio setup
then you might not be too motivated to troubleshoot it especially if
uninstalling it is the easiest solution to troubles. Few people would have
enough patience to continue... Once uninstalled troubleshooting ends and
negative experience might discourage further attempts. Perhaps most of us
have other priorities after all...
Lack of bug reports is not a problem. As far as I can see there are nearly
200 bugs reported against pulseaudio and this number is growing. Lack of
manpower seems to be the real problem so it would be nice if those who like
pulseaudio would put a little more effort to help maintaining it.
--
Best wishes,
Dmitry Smirnov
GPG key : 4096R/53968D1B
---
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and
wrong.
-- H. L. Mencken
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