I have followed rather heated discussions in blog post comments and mailing list archives about PulseAudio and GNOME and I must say I am not impressed. Why?
There are many reasons why I think that PA is cool, but I also think that somehow there is no way, no progression out of it and it's not right way to solve GNOME audio problems. Also there is feeling in the air that is some kinda committee decision, that some people have decided it's cool and it _must_ be included in distros/GNOME/etc. However, PA won't fix numerous problems with GNOME itself, and stuff like device removal/insertion should be done by HAL/GVM/etc. Why double efforts? Why not first fix what is broken? Maybe I am missing here something? Mine objections: 1. First and foremost - Pro card users (as I own one such myself and I use it not only for pro means). PA is quite a disappointment in this field, mostly including latency, and PA developers has only one answer to that - we will take care about simple users first. I don't like this answer, because I see pro card users as potential userbase (thanks of lot of development in this field), and I don't want them to be turn off from Linux just because their chosen distro suddenly lags or sound doesn't work quite precise. Not every pro user uses and wants to use JACK, so it's not argument. 2. Device addition/removal - just question - why this should be in PA? Shouldn't it have to be handled in HAL/ALSA/GNOME level? Why not fix device selection for ALSA and current GNOME Sound capplet? 3. Why not "fix" Gstreamer to handle esound stuff and fix it in that level? It would require some small app, but everything else could be done in Gstreamer level. Resume: I have nothing big against PA, but I think it's not the right tool for solution and shouldn't be included as default in GNOME or distros for now (power users still can install it). Instead, focus should be on ALSA stuff first. Device detection, setting, etc. that should be handled with kinda GVM for audio devices, I think. Just my two user cents, casual GNOME user for almost eight years, Peter. _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
