Linux is not ready for Steam

[kaczu]

And many other distros don't.

And using PulseAudio is not a problem. Having it as an option is not a problem. I guess it's useful for some people, and power to them. Shoving it down everyone's faces and crippling existing applications to not work with the NATIVE sound architecture is a problem.

I don't get something. If your using Gentoo which offers the ability to easily fine tune packages via source what's your beef? Many software packages can be compiled without PA entirely (mplayer, xine, etc) so if you can go your own road why disable PA for everyone else when you don't plan on using it? Of course I'm aware that the option might not exist for everything but it does exist for most things.

So far, I haven't even known that PulseAudio exists, and when I found out about it, I disabled it in my USE flags and forgot all about it.

Again so your point is that while you use Gentoo everyone else should just get used to downloading the latest ALSA source to fix problems PA already does? That makes no sense whatsoever.

Why use PA if JACK provides it?

I have no problem with Jack however it still isn't doesn't have feature parity with PA. JACK2 does which is in transition ATM and isn't fully backwards compatible with Jack yet.

Because people shouldn't need to run an extra sound layer for very basic functionality?

They will do that no matter what. JACK sits above ALSA or OSS.

Because there are sound cards that do hardware mixing and you should let them do the hardware mixing?

and there's tons of software codecs that can't which is the problem. Onboard sound codecs are all over the map.

At this moment, every single Linux app works with ALSA. I don't see the need to reprogram all of them to use PulseAudio exclusively (as advocated by some people here), just to punish people who aren't using it.

Probably because ALSA doesn't run feature parity with any other low level sound API + sound server which all other OS's have. PA does and then some and it's portable.

I'm not saying that PulseAudio does not serve a purpose. Perhaps such a solution really is needed for the future, considering the bluetooth cases people have mentioned or usb plug and play, etc.

But the things you've listed aren't some far away promise. That hardware and expectation exist now. Not after the next patch or next version, but now.

But don't come to me with software mixing FUD that is easily checked by anyone with access to a sane distribution, and stories about per-app-volume.

Stories? The wiki how to for ALSA includes the how to for this issue. Why on earth did they do that? To make me fall asleep easier at night? I'd hardly call it a "story".

If per-app-volume is the killer argument, then I really don't accept that you need a whole new professional sound infrastructure with 1,000 new professional features running as a daemon over ALSA to do such a trivial thing. That's an abomination.

But as you said it's not just that feature alone but all of them combined. What you're suggesting is that we throw out all of the other features then spend months to year adding in the new feature while keeping Steam on the backburner during this process. Then at some point spend even more developer time to add in all the features PA and the all other OS's have while hoping we don't have a regression which could break Steam for everyone. Does that really make sense to you?

[benmoran]

I agree with Kaczu's points. I'm not against "plain" Alsa, but I don't want to give up any of the functionality Pulse provides. It's 2010!
I use both bluetooth headsets, AND USB audio devices. My webcam, or example, has a built in mic. I don't leave the thing plugged in all the time, so it needs to be easy to switch to that for input when I do. I think this kinda stuff is expected from casual users these days, so Pulse is needed to keep some users happy until/unless these features are implemented in Alsa.


Also to get back to the main title of this thread, I disagree. For better or worse, we can just expect that Valve will target Ubuntu as the main platform. They won't worry about getting every odd audio setup to work, just the current Ubuntu release. People on other distros will just have to try to get it working themselves, if it doesn't already. If they do decide to support ONLY pulse output over Alsa, they non Pulse users are screwed. That's the cold reality. Hopefully they choose Alsa.

[darkphoenix22]

USB audio devices work perfectly with ALSA, in my experience. It's a matter of switching your audio device in the mixer. At least it is with Xfce Mixer.

Bluetooth needs work. But games are much more important to my aims than Bluetooth.

[darkphoenix22]

Plus I can choose to use an USB Headset instead of a Bluetooth one.

[deanjo]

USB audio devices work perfectly with ALSA, in my experience. It's a matter of switching your audio device in the mixer. At least it is with Xfce Mixer.

Just as easy in KDE's control panel as well. Drag the device preferred to the top of the list and apply.

[darkphoenix22]

[darkphoenix22]

BTW my keyboard volume controls work perfectly with ALSA and Xfce Mixer too. The little indicator on the panel even shows my volume level, so I don't have to open the mixer.

[darkphoenix22]

This leads to spaghetti code in audio drivers, some of
which are marginally less hair-loss-inducing than others. The
traditional ALSA driver semantics are interrupt-based. PulseAudio,
with its emphasis on preventing excessive power consumption through
timer-based buffering, expects the underlying driver to duly provide
precise and accurate information. For the past three years this
approach has utterly destroyed any semblance of "stability" in the
audio stack -- for good reason: the drivers incorrectly assumed the
underlying hardware duly acted precisely and accurately. We've been
fixing these drivers as such symptoms appear, and we're by no means
finished -- nor do I expect we'll ever reach such a milestone.

PA is happy to grant high latency by default because doing so is more
friendly to lower power consumption. Various pulse clients (whether
frameworks like SDL or OpenAL-soft) have been fixed to properly
specify latency requirements and act accordingly.

Source: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ub...ay/011343.html

[kaczu]

USB audio devices work perfectly with ALSA, in my experience.

It's not that USB sound doesn't work. It's that USB audio devices are usually very very crappy in the driver dept. So that if your device works, the likelyhood of it working as intended is slim. PA bridges that gap since all it wants is reliable output from ALSA. It still might not be pretty but generalized you're likely to have a better experience if the device has basic driver support.

[kaczu]

Source: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ub...ay/011343.html

You're taking what he's saying out of context. He's not saying to get rid of Pulse. He's describing issues that need to be resolved. However what you cut out is that latency is more related to how timing is implemented not that PA itself is high latency. Actually PA has a low latency mode which can be used to fix many issues which he describes.