Really, it’s as simple as that. Pulseaudio tried to be the systemd of sound and failed succeeded pretty horribly. Even its packaging was horrible, back when it was first put into Fedora and I tried uninstalling, it threatened taking down Libreoffice and Gedit with it.
back when it was first put into Fedora and I tried uninstalling, it threatened taking down Libreoffice and Gedit with it.
I did this back when I was a newbie and somehow destroyed either the display server or some other part of the GUI. Sound issues have made me nervous ever since.
I don’t know what universe were you living in, but I remember history vastly differently. No app I ever used ever had problems with ALSA, not even gaming. XMMS or XMMS2 (or Audacious even back then when it was kinda starting) never had issues with Firefox. Only when PA was introduced I started losing audio on various apps, losing volume control, or in a few cases apps would cease listing ALSA as a possible audio output while PA was installed.
I killed PA on my machines hard and never had any issues again, and things pretty much only improved once Pipewire arrived other than having to change one (1) configuration file, and it was properly documented.
Xfree? Who’s talking about that? I’ve only ever had to use Xorg, and I only ever needed to touch its conf file if I needed to fiddle with the refresh rate of an external monitor. (Compared to that, its “”““modern””“” replacement Wayland doesn’t even start a full desktop session on my machine)
No, we’re talking about the crap that was PulseAudio, and how ALSA; which is unrelated to XFree, worked almost flawlessly and barely needed any configuration. Formatted my machine several times and remember there was someties a path to the dev (/dev/snd or something like that usually, I think? I sometimes see it thrown around when doing advanced stuff with stuff like mpv) but I was lucky that when I had to edit my file it was for hardware bugs and not for software things. I… think? nowadays that bug is acknowledged for either at the ALSA or the Pipewire level, haven’t delved enough to check.
Dealing with sound servers on the Linux community does feel like a rarity going-backwards kind of thing: to this day, Firefox for some weird ass-reason dropped ALSA support in favour of PulseAudio. But in Debian, the packaged Firefox versions continue to work with ALSA flawlessly - as if support never was dropped, despite the many versions and changes since. Which suggests me to think Mozilla never actually dropped support, they just flipped a switch somewhere to promote PA instead, which usually comes down to money deals. Mozilla is an expert at that kind of thing.
Shoddy workmanship due to how eager those devs are to push their beta testing software on Production, yeah. And honestly looking back, coming from Fedora, doesn’t surprise me.
Pipewire’s got fantastic JACK support. You can even run standard JACK control GUI’s like Carla on top of it and expect them to work just like they would on regular JACK
I do still have some problems with freewheeling. Ardour always crashes on exports when using the Jack interface, but everything works over the Pulseaudio interface. It might be an Ardour thing, but it doesn’t occur when actually running Jack. So something is actually different with Pipewire.
No idea if that’s the case but they certainly seem to have been made with the same mentality. FOSS has for a while suffered of what I call the “Icaza pest”, trying to bring the Microsoft way of design and programming into Linux. The results and troubles this causes abound, considering eg.: the fart that has been Gnome themes since 3.x, or the Gnome posturing back in the day that “users have no right to change their settings” when modernization of Gnome-terminal, and how it’d interact with stuff like screen and dtach, were discused.
Really, it’s as simple as that. Pulseaudio tried to be the systemd of sound and
failedsucceeded pretty horribly. Even its packaging was horrible, back when it was first put into Fedora and I tried uninstalling, it threatened taking down Libreoffice and Gedit with it.I did this back when I was a newbie and somehow destroyed either the display server or some other part of the GUI. Sound issues have made me nervous ever since.
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I don’t know what universe were you living in, but I remember history vastly differently. No app I ever used ever had problems with ALSA, not even gaming. XMMS or XMMS2 (or Audacious even back then when it was kinda starting) never had issues with Firefox. Only when PA was introduced I started losing audio on various apps, losing volume control, or in a few cases apps would cease listing ALSA as a possible audio output while PA was installed.
I killed PA on my machines hard and never had any issues again, and things pretty much only improved once Pipewire arrived other than having to change one (1) configuration file, and it was properly documented.
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Xfree? Who’s talking about that? I’ve only ever had to use Xorg, and I only ever needed to touch its conf file if I needed to fiddle with the refresh rate of an external monitor. (Compared to that, its “”““modern””“” replacement Wayland doesn’t even start a full desktop session on my machine)
No, we’re talking about the crap that was PulseAudio, and how ALSA; which is unrelated to XFree, worked almost flawlessly and barely needed any configuration. Formatted my machine several times and remember there was someties a path to the dev (
/dev/sndor something like that usually, I think? I sometimes see it thrown around when doing advanced stuff with stuff like mpv) but I was lucky that when I had to edit my file it was for hardware bugs and not for software things. I… think? nowadays that bug is acknowledged for either at the ALSA or the Pipewire level, haven’t delved enough to check.Dealing with sound servers on the Linux community does feel like a rarity going-backwards kind of thing: to this day, Firefox for some weird ass-reason dropped ALSA support in favour of PulseAudio. But in Debian, the packaged Firefox versions continue to work with ALSA flawlessly - as if support never was dropped, despite the many versions and changes since. Which suggests me to think Mozilla never actually dropped support, they just flipped a switch somewhere to promote PA instead, which usually comes down to money deals. Mozilla is an expert at that kind of thing.
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Well that’s just poor packaging.
Shoddy workmanship due to how eager those devs are to push their beta testing software on Production, yeah. And honestly looking back, coming from Fedora, doesn’t surprise me.
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Pipewire’s got fantastic JACK support. You can even run standard JACK control GUI’s like Carla on top of it and expect them to work just like they would on regular JACK
I do still have some problems with freewheeling. Ardour always crashes on exports when using the Jack interface, but everything works over the Pulseaudio interface. It might be an Ardour thing, but it doesn’t occur when actually running Jack. So something is actually different with Pipewire.
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IIRC wasn’t Pulseaudio and systemd made by the same person?
No idea if that’s the case but they certainly seem to have been made with the same mentality. FOSS has for a while suffered of what I call the “Icaza pest”, trying to bring the Microsoft way of design and programming into Linux. The results and troubles this causes abound, considering eg.: the fart that has been Gnome themes since 3.x, or the Gnome posturing back in the day that “users have no right to change their settings” when modernization of Gnome-terminal, and how it’d interact with stuff like
screenanddtach, were discused.It’s not all FOSS it’s just those projects. You don’t have to use Gnome.
But their choices do impact other projects. I may not use Gnome, but the choices made on theming (or lack of) , for example, now also effect XFCE.