I often feared PA, and something in ALSA (I almost know zero about linux audio stack) made it a zero effort / 99% working thing that matched what I want for audio, that is a no sweat thing that just push sound. I can live without multi room networked audio, but having local audio crash randomly is too much a PITA. Feels like having lisp macros on top of VBA.
That said I wish we could find a better solution. Something between ALSA and PA. Also PA demands quality driver, IIRC Lennard told he cannot get blamed for that, it's a bit like GPUs in a way; and I wish we'd have open hardware audio chip that were simple and not lying.
That said a default fallback would be so good. I can't stop thinking that LP writes things for his own world and leave it there when he's "satisfied" with it; even if it means shit for the rest. Which means the issue is that he shouldn't be in charge of socially impactful components.
Unless you have examples of solid patches fixing these kind of problems that he rejected, this is a significantly unfair statement.
At least that’s what’s been apparent to me from the things that I’ve read by him and about him.
And I'm not sure it's really ego.. I'd rate him at about 0.07geohots.
Just two more random examples:
RPi 3, audio would hang randomly when opening a new process using audio from another using audio. The solution would be to either play an audio sample from the command line to unclog the audio system, or uninstall PulseAudio.
Ubuntu 16.04. Rewinding the video while using mplayer could cause the audio to play at a faster rate. Again uninstalling PulseAudio would solve the problem.