PulseAudio Fail

2009 / 2010 - Linux Audio Fail

Are Ubuntu going to use Pulseaudio in the LTS / next version ?
I hope not. i think Pulseaudio is harming desktop Linux.


For years i've been happy with audio on Linux.
even since 1998 when i first built the drivers for my winmodem
( remember those? ) - the audio worked, yes, even on Redhat Linux 5.0, maybe it was lucky having the right 'out of the box -almost' hardware back then, but it worked. 12 years ago. okay, there was no VOIP back then, but now there is, and it must work, and it must work well, or even work better than it does on Win, Linux networking is vastly superior than anything MS can cobble together / steal / or buy off a student, so why the sudden screw-up of  Linux audio,
why now ?


Pulseaudio hell is not just limited to the Ubuntu family though, in fact, in my tests its been broken in some way on every distro i've tried this year. one of the Pulseaudio dev's even expresses Ubuntu's nasty implementation of pulse.
http://0pointer.de/blog
If it sounds like i'm going to go into a diatribe about the where's and why's of how Linux audio was broken, i'm not. i have few answers. hack it, or dont use it.


i know we dont need pulse audio yet.
i know most of us want reliability now
i know most of us just dont want to have to dick around with the damn thing.
i know Pulse is the default audio, on most Linux distro's
i know it hasn't performed well enough on any distro i have tried in the last year
i know ALSA was'nt perfect, but why jump out of the frying pan,


- And what the hell was the big problem with ALSA / DMIX anyway ?
why in Ubuntu Jaunty do i have to remove Pulseaudio like Tux says here ?
remove pulseaudio in Jaunty
how do they release this without testing it a little more ? are Karmic etc all beta ?
Karmic KDE 9.10 messes up with phonon errors,  it brain farts and says something like


"KDE has detected that one ore more internal sound devices have been removed. Do you want KDE to forget about those devices? "


Dammit No !!  and so it falls back to HDMI audio output, it does this at seemingly  random boot-ups, which means, er, no sound really. this is a KDE Phonon bug, NOT a Ubuntu one. i much prefer KDE 4.x but its still buggy.


As for all my distro hopping lately, its been caused by wanting a solid multimedia distro,  but more modern than our old friend KDE 3.5.x i have to admit that MEPIS 8.01 is the most solid and least buggy Linux distro still current that i have found. i'm not including Slack Gentoo or Arch .. which are great distro's, but i think very old-fashioned  and time-consuming to set up and use.
with Mepis 8 and ALSA - it does my DVB (kaffeine) Skype, Amarok etc all at the same time. dmix.
nice work Warren, don't rush to 4.x mate.
download Mepis


Gnome is much less buggy than KDE 4.x, but it should be, its far older, and is a much more dumbed-down interface, you've much less control over the system and GNOME is so damn 'fugly' too, like some flat old 1990's OS. and it is.


Since Ubuntu is supposedly aimed at new users, maybe shipping with a working audio subsystem is a necessity ? or how are you possibly going to keep those people you've so publicly looked to recruit ? maybe a revert to ALSA ?


 And Pulseaudio,..  why ? - its not ready, maybe never will be, so why ship it ?
- some 'notional' network audio and routing capabilities that most of us are never really going to use ? and cross platform ? why ?
lets just worry about our platform for now.
In my tests pulseaudio cant reliably get audio from the mic and speakers in the same damn box, certainly not over a network, and its damn poor it does.
FAIL.


Ubuntu for newbies ? - but comes with the most unreliable, quirky, fiddly complicated buggy sound system... hmm.. whose idea was that then ?


No. i think you see the problem.
Issues like ditching Gimp are, in comparison, mostly irrelevant, the first thing newbies will probably want to do is to keep / junk / install their applications. and on any OS, Gimp is just one of these apps. but this is a side issue. lets move on.take damn Office out of the distro's too. i dont live in a office. .God NO !


I agree with Pat Davilla from the 'Linux Linc Tech Show' (radio show / podcast) about pulseaudio, that JACK for example, would be a much better candidate than pulseaudio.. and it has been used in a distro already. thanks Pat,
hear    Linux Link Tech Show     episode 333
have a listen to the show and if you're not subscribing to the podcast, whats' wrong with you ?!


Comments welcome, flames are directed to /dev/null !!