DragonFlyBSD Decides To Drop PulseAudio

[Ardje]

So did you measure how the latency changed, is the buffering any different? It might just work if you're just playing stuff from youtube or mpv, but those requirements aren't that high. Heck, I have 2000 to 4000 ms latency with Airplay on my iPad connected to Shairport and it works just fine, according to quite many folks. Especially those who used the system. Of course the latency makes stuff like playing a game with sounds coming from external speakers just impossible due to the 2-4 second delay, but Spotify, Youtube and those all "work". Due to these limitations, I can't even imagine using it for any "demanding" purpose like karaoke. People in general are quite tolerant when it comes to audio latency. If you look at Linux menuconfig, they actually recommend a HUGE buffer for Pulseaudio users.. I wonder why if it's so great. Why doesn't JACK need multiple second buffers but PA needs them. I wonder why..

Indeed. The problem with PA is that it only works for desktop users. But those desktop users thinks that means it works for everybody. Those desktop users tend to also be distro maintainers, so in noob friendly distro's it's pretty hard to install jack, and only use jack.
Depending on my target I use pa (nobody notices a 2s delay), alsa (especially for headless,always works, but you have to know what you are running, and things like chromium don't work), or jack (mixxx, hydrogen, any real audio application, need some DBUS fiddling to run it headless).
On gaming riggs I usually purge anything pa, until I started using steam, which seems to need PA to stream. Which can result in time of audio lag > 10S. But that is probably a steam bug.
Anyway, at least jack is multiplatform :-).

[starshipeleven]

Of course the latency makes stuff like playing a game with sounds coming from external speakers just impossible due to the 2-4 second delay,

Dunno, all games I play on linux don't have these huge latency issues.

If you look at Linux menuconfig,

None gives a fuck about menuconfig, everyone uses distro-shipped kernel.

they actually recommend a HUGE buffer for Pulseaudio users.. I wonder why if it's so great. Why doesn't JACK need multiple second buffers but PA needs them. I wonder why..

Jack uses ramdisks for buffering, that's why.

[starshipeleven]

it's pretty hard to install jack, and only use jack.

This is true regardless of distro, quit throwing shit on distros.
Jack requires manual configuation, you cannot think mantainers also prepare bigass self-aware install scripts to also pre-configure very device-specific and OS-specific stuff for you.

[F.Ultra]

So that means you're either ignorant or just bad faith.

Pulseaudio is not a modern sound system, it's band aid for a badly designed audio driver.

The fact is with the stock FreeBSD kernel, you can get multi-channel audio with per application and/or global volume control. No audio sound server needed. Only Linux needs PA to achieve the same result (with inevitably more latency). Because without PA, Linux sound is pretty much broken. and even with PA, it's still broken for some people. In FreeBSD, once properly configured, sound just works.

And btw, this is one of the reasons that led me to choose FreeBSD over Linux many years ago. I never regretted it.

Which of course is because the BSDs have their own audio sound server called sndiod and some of the things that PA does on Linux is in the BSD kernel. BSD without sndio and sndiod would be as broken as Linux without PA. That being said, yes most ALSA drivers are probably in a very bad state as compared with the OSS drivers.

[beast]

Only OpenBSD has sndio.