PulseAudio...why?

[Eric Griffith]

Hey guys, not really related to KDE but just kind of curious.

The way that I understood it... PulseAudio came along because Alsa and
OSS couldn't reliably handle multiple applications outputting sound at
the sametime. Last night I moved from Fedora to Arch and I was getting
everything set up; and I found that if I enabled DMIX support under
Alsa, it was one less layer of overhead; still had ACTUAL hardware
access (not just "Pulse Sound Server") And I could get outputs from
multiple apps.

Now; one little caveat that was mentioned on the Arch Wiki was that
DMIX can have really bad sampling by default, but that it was an easy
fix under .asoundrc via "  defaults.pcm.rate_converter
"samplerate_best"  " The downside to this was it caused higher CPU
Usage; which as the industry says, CPU Power is cheap.

Fedora, Ubuntu, Mageia, they all install PulseAudio by default...but
really, is it necessary now that CPU's are more powerful and DMIX has
its bugs worked out? It just seems like one more layer of overhead,
one more layer of lost preformance because of abstraction, and one
more layer where something can go wrong.

If I'm wrong, PLEASE tell me because I'd love to learn something new.
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