On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 6:13 AM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote: [snip] > Like an earlier poster suggested, PulseAudio looks like a hammer in search of > a nail.
I have a bluetooth headset. I set it up with gnome-bluetooth, and with PulseAudio I can dynamically redirect the output in my laptop from the speakers to the headset and back; it also redirects it automatically when my headset gets disconnected or runs out of battery. Good luck doing that with ALSA. PulseAudio is here to stay, and for a very good reason I say. It's not "too complicated" or "overkill"; a modern sound architecture for desktop computers was in dire need for Linux, and PulseAudio was the first complete and (more important) correct designed solution. Don't even mention OSS4; the sound architecture goes in user space, not the kernel. This is why *ALL* the Linux based mobile phones use PulseAudio: it *works*, and it *makes sense* from a technical point of view. It sucked for a long time? Indeed it did; just like KDE 4.0 sucked immediately afer KDE 3.5; just like X.org sucked at the very beginning; just like ALSA sucked when it replaced OSS; just like GNOME 2.0 sucked. Innovation is expensive. I have PulseAudio running perfectly in my laptop, my desktop, *and* my MediaCenter connected to my 5.1 system. Via HDMI, by the way. I thank for PulseAudio; now, after the initial (and very annoying) problems, it works, it doesn't get in the way, and it's flexible enough to adapt to new hardware and new sound solutions. Bluetooth headsets it's just one example (but a very good one I believe; everything is going wireless); there are USB sound cards, transparently output the music from my laptop to my MediaCenter, and, of course, little beeps from the GUI when I click a menu item. I repeat: PulseAudio is here to stay. You can purge it out of your system, but more and more applications will make use of it, and eventually you will not be able to have a desktop without it. Right now it works flawlessly in the majority of hardware; I highly recommend to start using it now (it's stable in Gentoo since a couple of months ago, I believe); and better get used to it. Because it's not going anywhere. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Instituto de Matemáticas Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
