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A comment on The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop. Parent comment

Re:The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop by nitrogen on Sunday June 12, 2011 @06:25AM (#2646240)
Gnome user here. PulseAudio is always screwing up the settings on/misbehaving with my SB Live 5.1, and there's no way to assign the rear or center/lfe outputs as headphone outputs instead, which is a piece of cake with plain ALSA (just use alsamixer to set the Wave Surround mixer to ~-16dB). Oh yeah, PulseAudio also ignores the decibel hints given by ALSA, and frequently sets the output gain to +12dB on some integrated sound cards, causing terrible distortion. Applications trying to work around the PulseAudio situation (Skype, Flash) by preventing me from selecting my hardware-mixed ALSA output have their own problems. I have many other complaints, but it's far easier to just uninstall PA and have a nice, clean audio system.
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Re:The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop by andor on Sunday June 12, 2011 @07:51AM (#2646317)
If you find a bug in actively maintained software like PulseAudio, please report it. The best thing to do here is not to work around a bug, but to participate in the community and help to improve the software.
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Re:The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop by nitrogen on Sunday June 12, 2011 @04:33PM (#2647328)
That's the ideal situation, of course, but I disagree with the entire premise of PulseAudio. It has some interesting features (per-application volume, network audio, synchronization between sound cards at slightly different sample rates), but those should have been implemented as additions to ALSA and/or one of the jackd implementations.

There are also the hurdles to jump through of signing up for a bug tracker account, searching for existing similar bugs, watching my report get ignored because it's not an "average user" use case, etc. For someone like me who's experienced with ALSA, written a sound card driver, and had things "just work" for a very long time, there's greater incentive for me to just rip out PulseAudio and get back to work.

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