I am far from a guru, but I am a twenty-one year Linux user since Kernel 0.91. Pulse audio has been, at least since Kernel 3.0, a pain in my side. I currently run Jessie 8.0 on both my Compaq desktop and my HP laptop (64 bit AMD Sempron and Turion x2 respectively,) On both systems Pulseaudio craps out the instant that I try to make any settings changes at all.snf I have been unable to find out why in any reasonable period of time.
The fact that someone here described the hughe CPU load that it causes finally caused me to act. it took me a half hour to totally eliminate it and set up a complete alsa installation which is utterly reliable. I will not go back, even if pulseaudio is repaired and made less of a system hog. Being an experienced user and a retired sysop/lan/domain and ISSO manager for many years (RTE-A, HP-UX, Ultrix, IRIX, QNX, Linux over the years) but not a really good programmer, I rely on and prefer simple and robust software. Linux has been amazingly good for most of its life but over the last few years it has begun to show serious signs of bloating. I mean the sort of thing that Detroit did when they put tail-fins on cars and the sort of unmentionable obscenities that came out of Microsoft whenever they needed to generate more revenue, i.e., install a bunch of new options and features in a software package that few people needed, but which required changes which were incompatible with the last version, thus forcing their customers to update to bloatware which strained their old boxes enough to make them want to buy new ones. My own opinion, for what it's worth, is to keep your system simple, stupid, as the saying goes. Ed
