[pulseaudio-discuss] /.

[Jeremy Nickurak]

My 2 cents. I'm a big pulseaudio fan, and I love what it gets me in my
desktop experience.

Unfortunately, the ill-informed rants are informed about their personal user
experience. There's a lot of people who were really peeved at what
pulseaudio has done to their user experience, and they see pulseaudio as the
problem. Sound worked fine without pulseaudio, and when pulseaudio was
added, things stopped working. That's what they saw.

   - Maybe pulseaudio wasn't ready for those distros (many crashes... and
   maybe it's not ready today. How close to crash-free is it?).
   - Maybe the distributions broke it, and have never really fixed it
   (Ubuntu certainly isn't following the "Perfect Setup" advice, even in karmic
   AFAICT. Audio goes to pulse if and only if it the app expressly requests a
   connection to the pulseaudio daemon, which of course causes problems)

The first things these "ill-informed" people are doing when they install a
linux is to uninstall pulseaudio, and the first thing they're telling people
to do if their audio doesn't work is to uninstall pulseaudio. This hurts *a
lot* when most people get their tech support by word of mouth, irc, mailing
lists, and forums.

There's a massive perception problem here, and it's going to take a big and
coordinated move by pulseaudio devs AND distributions, likely with an
apology from someone/everyone involved, if people are to be open to the idea
of, to their minds, taking a chance on trusting it again.

If this sounds a bit like a rant, it's because I'm getting tired of
defending pulseaudio when people who (I believe) know linux a lot better
than me say "Yeah, you're making great points about features. But look:
Sound doesn't work on this machine. I remove pulseaudio. Everything works
again!"
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