Is Pulse Audio the worst trajedy in the history of Linux?

[wayne128]

Nick,

you say

"This is a huge assumption. How do you know that the people who didnt post have not also had problems with pulse audio?"

What is the point of reading about the problem and then not contributing?.

I know this an older thread but i couldnt resist-----
I dunno, research perhaps? Pulse is a MAJOR pain in the arse in a distro thats just supposed to work... In my Opinion, it should never have shipped with ANYTHING. I don't care how elegant or noble an idea it is, when something doesn't work, you don't just ship it and let the community sort it out. Ship it IF and WHEN it can be shown that the major bugs are worked out.

oh no. don't remind me.

just got it again when I reinstall LMDE with upgrade.
no sound, video super fast forward, totally cured by uninstalling PA.
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 20#p444994

on another distros I used for quite a while, no sound due to PA, samething I got to uninstall PA, then that distros ran well for next two more revisions, but the most newest, greatest, fastest revision, no sound again.. No longer want to uninstall PA, instead, get away from that distros, found no point wasting time on such sound issue.

[fraxinus_63]

Pulse Audio is not bad software, but its implantation is not ready for mainstream users who dont know how to trouble shoot. People are probably just walking away from Ubuntu/Mint when their sound doesnt work without even trying to figure out whats causing it.

Whats worse, People tend to get lots of insulting answers to their sound problems, like asking if their volume is turned on. Im sure this helped some people, but an acknowledgement that Pulse Audio causes sound problem complaints by the metric ton should be included in any sound bug complaints.

I agree. I have had problems (of one kind or another) with Pulse Audio on every distro I have tried which installs it as default. I curse about these problems, and they waste time and energy, but I am experienced at googling them out and getting to the bottom of them - eventually. I fear that many Pulse Audio problems will be show-stoppers to users who are new to Linux.

Now it is working (after considerable effort, and with help from this forum and various other forums and blogs) I am using Pulse Audio on my Julia install, but suspect I'll be moving to ALSA soon.

[Nick_Djinn]

Pulse and Ubuntu is supporting my current hardware, at the moment....which is nice.

And I dont mean to pick fights, but only a uber-geek is going to give somebody shit for not "fixing" a problem, like its 1988 and everyone who uses Linux is not only a master of the command line but can program in a dozen computer languages. Its a little obnoxious considering that Ubuntu is supposed to be the distro that works out of the box that granny or your 4 year old can use. Trouble shooting pulse is hardly intuitive. Removing it is not like adding or removing an application or driver. Its a major pain in the ass, and stuff breaks if you do it wrong.

And sorry for not taking the time to learn how to program in python before complaining. I would have written a free alternative capable of self correcting any glitches and running some common fixes (including the ability to remove itself and reinstall while recopying all your files and settings and apps in a worse case scenario) but I lack the skill.


Its working for me at the moment, but only because my hardware likes it. I sympathize with people who it hasnt been working for.

Ive lost so many installs to pulse....A normal person would have given up on Linux, given my experience. I was determined on principle to not support the corporations, so I kept at it and it was worth it.....though Jack is the way to go.

[sjonesy]

pulse is a major reason I keep going back to isadora in one form or another. Its a damn good thing the idjets at canonical dont maintain the kernel, otherwise we'd be stuck with no alternatives.
Dunno how many kernels Ive built just to get alsa/oss support in a newer distro.
I do like the way mint 11 and 10 look, but Ill be damned If I'm going to rebuild kernels everytime a distro gets updated.

[Nick_Djinn]

+1.

It sucks that Gnome is now using pulse, or working with the assumption of it. It was also disappointing to see it added to some of the lite distros. Why?


I think there needs to be a user friendly shell for Jack, something with a front end as easy as pulse, but without the reliability and compatibility problems.


You dont really need pulse if you are using a good player. If you are using Banshee and VLC, you can control the volume without doing it in pulse. I could be mistaken here, but beyond the niceties of the front end I dont think its really that necessary for the functionality if a minority of users will get turned off from linux because of it.


Its been working well for me lately.....but I still hear about these problems.

[AlbertP]

At me Pulse just works. Speakers, microphone, it all works, so I'm not going to change anything. "Don't fix it if it ain't broken"

[Nick_Djinn]

Argument from personal experience is often faulty of having a poor sample size, calling into question the reliability of the statistic.

I think Pulse is improving, but I think Linux lost a huge chunk of people due directly to pushing Pulse Audio in an unrefined implementation. Wifi and sound problems are probably the two biggest reasons people immediately reinstall Windows.

Pulse used to give desktops a lot of problems when they had a separate sound card from the on board sound.

I personally think that Linux has 4% of the desktop market or more....I think the huge proliferation of bots on virus infected computers running windows skews the results in Windows favor.

I think pulse could have cost the community tens if not hundreds of thousands of users globally....and ever lost user is additionally lost PR.


Pulse Audio is getting better though. Its less and less buggy in Ubuntu with every release. Its on its way to being decent, but fixing it is a massive pain in the ass and 2/3 of the instructions available for removing it either dont fix the problem or break your system worse.

[liquidstupid]

I'm digging up a one year old thread with a purpose, so bear with me. I'd not had any problem with Pulse until ... oh about now. Don't know how or why it's happened but I do know enough to blame Pulse for it. The symptom is easy to explain:

1. System boots with chime
2. Login/pass, desktop environment loads
3. Audio switched to dummy mode. Volume control does not detect Intel based audio

ALSA works in Audacious
SDL does not work in MilkyTracker (what is SDL anyway?)

Removed Pulse audio as outlined in this thread. Problem resolved. Thanks for that.

The fact of the matter is I've not had one complaint against Pulse Audio. I've frankly been blessed with a laptop that runs Linux Mint like a champion. Mind you to get the best out of it I've had to tweak, but then I'm not happy if I'm not playing with the settings, so I'm happy with that. I'm also learning a lot, so that's great too.

Look guys, since when did we start shutting down our brains when we picked up a new distro? Isn't the point of being a Linux user thinking through the process and learning? I expected to have a rough experience. I expected to lose data - I use Dropbox to back everything up. So PulseAudio is not mature. It's a work in progress, just as every other piece of software out there.

Nothin's perfect, there's just stuff that works, amirite? Yeah, I'm right.

It looks like PA has grown in the last year and the complaints are down, but always, always, be aware and prepared to fiddle with the settings. If you don't want to do that, get something else and don't complain it didn't work for you. It wasn't what you wanted anyway.

Cheers!

[liquidstupid]

Update to previous post:

All of my Toshiba Satellite 100 woes were resolved by switching to the KDE distribution of Linux Mint, which runs so smoothly it embarrasses everything else. Of course the SSD improves performance, but I am glad I gave Mint KDE a chance.

Oh, and PulseAudio works fine in this dist.

Cheers!

[JWJones]

Wow, an old PulseAudio thread come back to life! For the record, Slackware avoids PulseAudio, and other such nonsense from the LP Vanity Software Project such as systemd.