The linux idiots have one glaring example: PulseAudio
Throw away user experience, system stability, judicious use of CPU for what?
It certainly improves certain details of the user experience, when it works correctly, also usually consuming more CPU than flash player
You make a sweeping statement which is not true for every system. Looking at what happens playing a Youtube music video, according to htop:
- pulseaudio is using between 0 and 1% CPU
- plugin-container (wrapping Flash) is at 3%
- firefox oscillates between 20 and 40%
Now, my understanding is that, at the time pulseaudio came out, it was using untested functionalities in audio drivers which, for many chipsets, did not actually work and progressively got fixed. There was the same problem with graphics drivers when KDE 4.0 was introduced. Maybe you're out of luck and actually have a defective driver?
I'm not sure I have a bad driver, the last two chipsets I used were Intel (and no weird audio devices), works fine with other sw. Latest distro tested: RHEL 6 and Fedora 16
For me, PA would stay around 5%, 10% sometimes, and even more depending on the task. Not to mention crashing every week (at a random moment)
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=813407
I'm not sure if this could affect the CPU usage. I hear that you can play with the resample setting to lower it, but I haven't had to do that on a 5+ yo desktop.
Edit: to be clearer, HDA does not automatically mean Intel chip. I made that mistake before.
- How often do you reboot your computer
- What audio softwares you use the most
For me, PA crashes around once a week (and this is with the latest version I tried), or just plain stops working (like muting the sound, garbled sound, etc)
Not to mention the delay that happens while switching songs in mplayer for example. Use ALSA and song switch is instantaneous.
Once every two or three months, when I remember to apply updates.
> - What audio softwares you use the most
Only flash (youtube, primarily. Also youtube's html5 player probably, I haven't paid much attention to that) and mplayer. A few years ago, XMMS2. I used to use an XMMS2 client I wrote for music, now I just use some bash scripts and mplayer; I can't say I've noticed any delay while switching songs with mplayer or XMMS2.
When I play music from my laptop through my raspberry pi connected to my TV with pusleaudio, then I notice an audio delay. That is the only sore spot pulseaudio has ever presented me.
About the delay, try this: mplayer *mp3 (in a directory with mp3 files, of course), then press >. There should be a significant delay in switching songs (like, 0.5s). Make sure mplayer shows it's using the [Pulse] driver
With ALSA this is very fast
There's a good possibility that this is mplayer's fault more than PA's.
I previously had stock Debian on the machine, and everything was working fine. A half day's effort was put into toying with ALSA configs that Pulse was deferring to for whatever driver choices it made. Dozens of help articles or threads where everyone else in the world could proclaim "Thanks, that fixed it for me!" left me with less functionality than I started with.
The only thing Pulse has ever done right for me was was help to record some loopback audio on an otherwise-crippled sound card.
(After a few months of trying to make pulse work I left for FreeBSD, which works beautifully and avoids a lot of linux's change (seemingly) for the sake of change)
I can't understand all the dislike of PulseAudio either. It certainly has a nicer API than /dev/dsp.
I remember OSS and Alsa, and I don't miss either. As far as I can see, it makes Linux audio work like any other computer in this millennium.
I will admit having a lot of a hate for figuring out which audio 'profile' is which...
If you've got the plugs for 7.1 and a normal line in as well as possibly a digital one, they you've probably got 23 choices of profile for your built in audio device. Add in a GPU with HDMI and the NVIDIA driver and you probably get at least another 7+ choices all labeled Nvidia... I find I frequently have to guess multiple times whenever I hook up a TV via HDMI.
But it works quite well if you define works as works without adding on any usability riders.
> user experience
you can set up PulseAudio for LAN audio streaming with padevchooser (GUI). Could you do this with ESD? Arts? Tell me about this audio streaming solution with super UX for Linux that you know...
Yes, and? I understand this is a useful feature for some people, but I'm just interested in listening to music and PA does not me allow to do that without frequent crashes and bugs
I don't care about the features of a car if it stops working at random. And yes, this has happened on every distro I tried since PA started being bundled. Every single distro, every single machine I've had only a stable system with PA OFF
But PA is 8 years now.
I don't remember any software being so problematic as PA in the Linux world. Some have more problems, yes, but they usually have a limited deployment.
Yes, pulseaudio has all sorts of awesome esoteric features. You can stream sound transparently from a linux box to a windows one. That's kind of useless if it brings down your computer.
RHEL 6, Fedora 16, Mint 11 (while it was not obsolete), Ubuntu Maverick Meercat (amongst others)
Oh ok, so Fedora users just have to suck it up and having a crashing system? Congratulations, you don't know anything about distros.
Considering that was pretty much the point of it, of course.
The part I liked was that you would start ESD and everything just worked.
PulseAudio works wonderfully for me. It allows software mixing, something that's never been possible for me prior to PulseAudio, and it never crashes.
It also gives me a single place to control volume on a per-app basis (pavucontrol). That's not something I had prior to PulseAudio, either.
I can also keep a single desktop session going for months.
I like it. I think it does things right, and they can optimize it more over time. It is better than having a fast audio subsystem that just can't do what I want. Pulse is a kitchen sink that at least covers its bases.