On Fri, 2012-03-09 at 18:37 -0500, Loui Chang wrote: > I'm confused. Why is pulseaudio so necessary? I just use alsa for sound > and have no problems whatsoever. Granted, I don't use one of them fancy > shmancy desktop environments. IMPORTANT! WE NEED TO REPEAT THIS AGAIN AND AGAIN! Those fancy-schmancy DEs make PA a dependency, but that doesn't mean that PA is needed for those DEs. De facto audio out doesn't work with many sound cards, if PA is enabled. If it's disabled audio out does work with Jack + ALSA backend and ALSA only. "Disabling" PA doesn't work as expected for every distro, but usually simply replacing PA by a dummy package has got no unwanted side effect. For Archlinux there's a clean solution at least for GNOME, https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=48718 , I don't care about it, but installed a dummy package for PA, so what ever I wish to install, I don't need to take care, if PA is a dependency. AFAIK there's no DE that needs PA. Making PA a dependency for a DE, is like making X a dependency for brltty. - Ralf
