On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Jeremy Nickurak <pulseaudio-discuss at trk.nickurak.ca> wrote: > 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) While Ubuntu has done really bad things[0], Luke and I really don't intentionally break anyone's audio. In fact, since Jaunty/9.04, all audio in Ubuntu is routed through PulseAudio (in Ubuntu, cf. /usr/share/alsa/pulse*). (The bits were there for Intrepid/8.10, but the integration arguably was shabby.) The complication is that certain Ubuntu derivatives (e.g., Xubuntu, Kubuntu) don't ship PulseAudio, so configuring all the backends to use PulseAudio would cause further integration issues. It's not an ideal situation by any stretch. -Dan [0] Even recently, there was a poorly thought-out patch applied. It will be removed for Karmic final (too late for RC), and the right approach is being discussed with Lennart on irc.