2009/2/23 Alberto Passalacqua <alberto.passalacqua@tin.it>:
Hello,
PulseAudio has been one of the major sources of complaints and of problems for both the 11.0 and 11.1 release, with significant annoyances for openSUSE users, as reported on IRC and on local forums.
The problems I have with pulseaudio are outlined below (I have not filed bug reports yet as I'm quite happy having disabled it, and can't work out how to turn it back on, if someone can suggest how... :). The hardware is a creative (emu10k1 of some variety and I've had no problems with audio with these devices except with pulseaudio. Even 9 years ago there were no audio problems that compare with the problems I experience with pulseaudio. * It breaks hardware mixing Without pulseaudio I can play music in a music player, and run games that output to alsa directly. I hear both the music and the audio from the game. With pulseaudio this doesn't work, I hear only the output from the music player. It locks the sound device. Sure you could say the non-free unmaintained software should be rewritten to use PA but that's not going to happen. * Poor Audio Quality With pulseaudio audio music like it is played through excessively cheap headphones regardless of the player. I have no idea what causes this but disabling pulseaudio fixes it. * High CPU usage With pulseaudio playing music requires 10-20% of a core and noticibly slows down my machine. Without pulseaudio this is more like 1-2% * It breaks the volume control With pulseaudio for some reason each output channel seems to be adjusted independently when I just raise/lower the master volume. Which is quite disconcerting. * It provides me with zero benefit Other than networked sound. Who wants to use this, seriously?
As a consequence it is worth to consider the possibility to disable it by default on freshly installed systems for openSUSE 11.2.
Surely the question is whether there is a compelling reason to enable it by default given the problems everyone seems to experience with it? Multiple audio outputs at once? No we've had that for years, in fact PA breaks it. -- Benjamin Weber -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org