[pulseaudio-discuss] Pulseaudio in general - does it make sense?

[Markus Rechberger]

Hi,

I was using PA for around 1 1/2 years now. My feedback:
1. I asked for some help which worked out fine at the beginning
2. problems grew and are still growing .. I'd still get some help but
I just want to have my stuff work and I'm not interested in playing
debugger with Ubuntu anymore.
3. We use to sell devices which are supposed to play back some Audio.
It was a nightmare to add proper support for it! (we got alot negative
feedback from customers regarding audio - it now works but other
issues are still remaining).

4. I use Skype-out with my notebook, finally I thought everything is
working BUT .. no. People I called complained about the audio quality.
5. simply running apt-get remove pulseaudio -- hey it solved all the
issues I had? How comes? Alsa is working fine?

So what is the idea behind pulseaudio? Basically I nothing but had
problems with pulseaudio, removing it was usually the best way to go.
Using audio via network? I never did that and most people are already
happy if they can get basic audio work.

Also pulseaudio breaks the alsa support (eg. if root wants to access
audio it does not work root will get permission denied!)

So how should this be solved now:

Skype needs to work, the software is good even if it is closed source,
right now 11 Million people are signed up (according to the list,
don't know if skype fakes it or not)
Personally I do not like pulseaudio, it never worked correctly (an
example with Ubuntu 9.10: http://sundtek.de/support/pulseaudio.wav ..
after killing pulseaudio it worked)
PA developers usually use to claim that it's a matter of configuration
.. well then PA developers simply fail to provide a sane configuration
mechanism - and it is not the fault of the distribution guys who just
cobble together whatever they can find online.

Comments?

thanks,
Markus