Pulseaudio *sigh*

[Gregory Meyer]

On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 7:48 PM, Myriam Schweingruber <
schweingruber at pharma-traduction.ch> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> there is a serious problem with Pulseaudio being installed by default
> for Kubuntu since Jaunty.


Based on my experience, it is not installed by default unless you install
Kubuntu in some other way, like install ubuntu and then install the KDE
desktop.  When Jaunty came out I did a clean install and there was no
pulseaudio in sight (at least as far as I remember).


>
> Since this happened, we (the people who give Kubuntu, KDE and/or
> Amarok support) spend a lot of our time in the support channels,
> forums and mailing list giving instructions on how to get sound
> working on KDE, as it definitely doesn't work well with the Xine
> backend.
>
> Please consider a few facts:
>
> - KDE doesn't use Pulseaudio at all, there is not a single application
> that is meant to work with it by default,


True


> - Gstreamer in it's current state is not working well with Phonon
> neither, even if the Trolls have made some progress lately, it's not
> working nearly as well as Xine so far,
>

True


> - the couple Phonon + Xine works well and hardly gives any trouble in KDE,
>

Not entirely true.  I went looking into Pulseaudio because phonon was just
giving me all kinds of hassle.  I don't even no where to begin, but sound
not working, devices switching, system sounds working/not working, knotify
crashing.

Pulseaudio apparently only works correctly in combination with Gstreamer,
> - Amarok and Dragonplayer (as well as Kaffeine AFAIK) very often don't
> play sound when Pulseaudio is installed, and this seems to happen for
> many Jaunty users, who tend to be quite frustrated by that experience.


It works with Xine if it is set up properly, although I agree it is harder
than it should be.


> Shouldn't Kubuntu work by default for most of the users? Well, it
> doesn't, and it is a frequent reason for people to either abandon
> Amarok or KDE or even change distribution... which is certainly
> totally counterproductive!
>

Even if the idea behind Pulseaudio is interesting, it's implementation
> is far from perfect (and I am polite here....) I have the impression
> to be back in the old times where we had to struggle with
> arts....*shudder*
>

Totally agreed.  Not easy to set up, glitch-free mode is far from
glitch-free, not fully supported by all apps.  The problem KDE is going to
have here, is that the entire world + gnome is forcing PA on the rest of us
and it will be very hard to install any distro soon without it.

My biggest complaint is that in attempting to make things easy for the end
user, you make things so complicated that if they don't work as they are
supposed to, it is extremely difficult to undo them, if they can be undone
at all.


> I strongly suggest to make Pulseaudio an optional installation for
> Kubuntu in Karmic. It is a serious hindrance to the KDE experience,
> and I do not speak only about Amarok. Please, take advice from the KDE
> people on what should be a default sound installation before deciding
> for a Pulseaudio+Gstreamer couple to be default. Of course if
> Gstreamer and Pulseaudio are both ready and fixed to work correctly
> with Phonon and the KDE applications, no problem, but so far it's not
> the case.
>
> Why not consider replacing Phonon with PA   !ducks!

:p
-- 
Greg
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