My 2 cents. I'm a big pulseaudio fan, and I love what it gets me in my desktop experience. Unfortunately, the ill-informed rants are informed about their personal user experience. There's a lot of people who were really peeved at what pulseaudio has done to their user experience, and they see pulseaudio as the problem. Sound worked fine without pulseaudio, and when pulseaudio was added, things stopped working. That's what they saw. - Maybe pulseaudio wasn't ready for those distros (many crashes... and maybe it's not ready today. How close to crash-free is it?). - Maybe the distributions broke it, and have never really fixed it (Ubuntu certainly isn't following the "Perfect Setup" advice, even in karmic AFAICT. Audio goes to pulse if and only if it the app expressly requests a connection to the pulseaudio daemon, which of course causes problems) The first things these "ill-informed" people are doing when they install a linux is to uninstall pulseaudio, and the first thing they're telling people to do if their audio doesn't work is to uninstall pulseaudio. This hurts *a lot* when most people get their tech support by word of mouth, irc, mailing lists, and forums. There's a massive perception problem here, and it's going to take a big and coordinated move by pulseaudio devs AND distributions, likely with an apology from someone/everyone involved, if people are to be open to the idea of, to their minds, taking a chance on trusting it again. If this sounds a bit like a rant, it's because I'm getting tired of defending pulseaudio when people who (I believe) know linux a lot better than me say "Yeah, you're making great points about features. But look: Sound doesn't work on this machine. I remove pulseaudio. Everything works again!" -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pulseaudio-discuss/attachments/20091020/83b3631e/attachment.htm>
