> Date: Sun, 16 Aug 2015 13:37:37 -0700
> From: bri...@aracnet.com
>
[..snip list of PA inadequacies..]
>
> so soliciting opinions on whether or not getting rid of pulse audio is a good
> idea.
It's a good thing you're asking for opinions, because that's what
you're gonna get. A lot of it, probably ;)
It can be a good idea, or it may cause your hair to fall out or turn
gray. When I ditched pulseaudio, my idle system load average (as
reported through uptime) dropped from 0.7 to 0.03, which was
vindication enough for me.
If you're running Gnome, ditchting pulseaudio is simply not possible.
Not sure about other full-featured DEs, I think at least KDE still
allows you to use alsa directly. Then there's the case that bluez5 also
requires pulseaudio for any kind of bluetooth audio, and the inability
of modern "audio chips" to handle more than one audio stream at a time.
If you can live with those limitations (I know I can), you can go pure
alsa.
You may need to read up on configuring alsa through .asoundrc and/or
configuring gstreamer defaults through dconf. You especially might want
to look into the alsa dmix plugin if you expect to have sound output
from multiple programs at the same time.
So yes, it is doable, depending on what other programs you use and
what features you expect.
Regards,
Arno
