It Looks Like PulseAudio 13.0 Will Be Releasing Soon

[jo-erlend]

That didn't stop Pulse from making its way into various distros years ago. Not that I'm eager to go through all that again, but just pointing out the obvious

It's an interesting point. I use that example fairly often to explain why things that made sense in the past, does not make sense now. Ubuntu 8.04LTS was the first Ubuntu to use PulseAudio and it wasn't very good, but by 8.04.1, it had all been sorted out. Life as a Linux user before that, was extremely horrible. Do you remember when you didn't have audio in your video player because your music player had been put on pause and forgotten in the background?

Ubuntu chose to adopt PA early, because the problems were so excessive, it would not be possible to make a user-friendly distro without PA. These days, the average user won't have many issues with PA. There are some, but they make the system feel unpolished rather than unusable. Ubuntu also rushed to get Unity in as a replacement for Gnome Panel. That's a similar situation, where the old desktop came across as too dated to grab attention and they really needed something more modern. I don't just mean visually, but the ability to tap super in order to open a launch screen/menu, using super-combos to switch between window stacks, etc.

I really did understand the need to switch to Unity. But I think switching to Gnome Shell was way too early. There was no hurry. They could've just started adopting Gnome Shell as a "tech preview" and allow it to mature while keeping Unity the default.

But my point is that while I really like the concept of PipeWire, I think PA is more than good enough to be the default system for quite some time. Mainstream distros should not replace PA until PipeWire is proven significantly better over time.

[loganj]

why is this crap still around?
i have nothing but huge problems with pulse.

[bug77]

Well, I must say PA works perfectly now. When I first tried it many years ago, all it did is break audio completely. I was really against it. Now it just... works perfectly.

Yeah, I can relate to that. After reading countless pages about ALSA, trying to set up both my onboard audio and my USB DAC, PA made it as simple as setting default-sample-rate (and, if needed alternate-sample-rate) in a config file. It will take it from there and shove that setting down whatever audio stack you happen to be using under PA.

I don't think it can be just called a distro failure. Yes, there was some distributions that shipped it better than others but the overall problem was that Pulse was taking advantage of more of the ALSA feature set than other usages of ALSA up until that point and the underlying ALSA driver often had bugs that Pulse exposed. This was the same situation with NetworkManager and wireless in the Linux kernel at that time. Eventually the drivers got fixed and integration became more solid. It is worth remember the amount of resources being invested in desktop technologies remain a small fraction of what other vendors like Microsoft or Apple do and therefore when these technologies are first introduced, they are supported by such a small team of people that it is very impressive what has been accomplished. The initial integration pains are the price to pay for the relatively small amount of resources that commercial distribution vendors invest in the desktop.

I'm sorry, but no. I will forever have an issue with that approach.
Shipping software that doesn't work is and always will be a distro failure. A distro is expected to keep that software in their develop/testing/whatever branches until it's good enough for public consumption. I'm pretty sure you, at RedHat, never do that to RHEL.
I do agree that Linux' tiny market share doesn't make it easy to push for upstream fixes. But that's a lame excuse for treating your users as guinea pigs.

PS I'll take your list of stuff released in a half-baked form and add systemd. It hurt systemd in ways that it didn't recover to this day.

[F.Ultra]

Yeah, I can relate to that. After reading countless pages about ALSA, trying to set up both my onboard audio and my USB DAC, PA made it as simple as setting default-sample-rate (and, if needed alternate-sample-rate) in a config file. It will take it from there and shove that setting down whatever audio stack you happen to be using under PA.

I'm sorry, but no. I will forever have an issue with that approach.
Shipping software that doesn't work is and always will be a distro failure. A distro is expected to keep that software in their develop/testing/whatever branches until it's good enough for public consumption. I'm pretty sure you, at RedHat, never do that to RHEL.
I do agree that Linux' tiny market share doesn't make it easy to push for upstream fixes. But that's a lame excuse for treating your users as guinea pigs.

PS I'll take your list of stuff released in a half-baked form and add systemd. It hurt systemd in ways that it didn't recover to this day.

That kind of thing happens when shipping new software all over the world, open or closed doesn't matter. The thing is that no matter how much QA you perform internally it's not until you do shipment of v1.0 that you will have your software put through the real QA when millions of users will run it on all their crazy combinations of hardware, use cases and other bizarre circumstances.

I guarantee you that whoever you ask that have been responsible for shipping v1.0 of software to users will have the same experience. Hell even Microsoft that have the money and resources to have tens of thousands of people do their QA have major issues on every single v1.0 release.

[F.Ultra]

why is this crap still around?
i have nothing but huge problems with pulse.

Because the rest of us doesn't have those problems (which of course is a huge guess on my part since you didn't even write what kind of problems it is that you experience) and so far no distro have decided to replace software due to some random anonymous user on a forum expresses problems with it.

[bug77]

That kind of thing happens when shipping new software all over the world, open or closed doesn't matter. The thing is that no matter how much QA you perform internally it's not until you do shipment of v1.0 that you will have your software put through the real QA when millions of users will run it on all their crazy combinations of hardware, use cases and other bizarre circumstances.

I guarantee you that whoever you ask that have been responsible for shipping v1.0 of software to users will have the same experience. Hell even Microsoft that have the money and resources to have tens of thousands of people do their QA have major issues on every single v1.0 release.

You probably weren't around in the early days of PA. That thing broke left and right and, most annoying, things that used to work. Whether the blame lies with poor drivers or shoddy application integration, ultimately it was still distos' fault for shipping it like that.
I mean, imagine distros dropping GCC in favor of Clang five years ago. Hell, imagine them doing that switch now.

[[TV]]

You probably weren't around in the early days of PA. That thing broke left and right and, most annoying, things that used to work. Whether the blame lies with poor drivers or shoddy application integration, ultimately it was still distos' fault for shipping it like that.
I mean, imagine distros dropping GCC in favor of Clang five years ago. Hell, imagine them doing that switch now.

I have two fairly popular prosumer sound cards which were introduced around -00 and were still sold in this decade. To this day those cards haven't worked out of the box with ALSA and Pulseaudio. I still have to change settings manually to get them to output any sound after a distro installation. Other than that, Pulseaudio works great... unless I want to output audio with the quality that my sound cards are actually capable of. So I use OSS4.

[bug77]

I have two fairly popular prosumer sound cards which were introduced around -00 and were still sold in this decade. To this day those cards haven't worked out of the box with ALSA and Pulseaudio. I still have to change settings manually to get them to output any sound after a distro installation. Other than that, Pulseaudio works great... unless I want to output audio with the quality that my sound cards are actually capable of. So I use OSS4.

No offense, I posted above setting the sound quality is effectively a one liner in PA (yeah, you'd think there's GUI for that in 2019, but that would be DE's responsibility, not PA's). And I hope we're not talking Creative here. These things are iffy on Windows as well.

PA's "killer feature" is that it actually allows setting the volume per stream, so you can dial down whatever you run in the background when you need to let something else play louder. It's not a silver bullet, I hear (pun intended) JACK is still the go-to solution for low latency audio. But the features you need in 2019 from a modern desktop, PA delivers.

[F.Ultra]

You probably weren't around in the early days of PA. That thing broke left and right and, most annoying, things that used to work. Whether the blame lies with poor drivers or shoddy application integration, ultimately it was still distos' fault for shipping it like that.
I mean, imagine distros dropping GCC in favor of Clang five years ago. Hell, imagine them doing that switch now.

I've been around for decades before that ;-). Ubuntu specifically I've used as my main distribution since their first release back in 2004 (4.10 Warty Warthog).

I was one of the lucky ones, aka I had not a single problem with PA on any of my machines with 8.04LTS and what I wrote in my previous post I also wrote back then on forums since I had decades of experience of software distribution back then (of proprietary software) and I saw it just like how I see it today.

If you ever plan to produce and release a v1.0 piece of software yourself you will also find out the hard way that if you are going to wait until it's perfect you will never have a single release day in your life. I've seen lots of such projects as well during my days.

And I'm 100% confident that if Ubuntu hadn't decided to release PA back in 2008 then we still would have the same audio mess that we had prior to PA, because without the wide spread QA done by the populace it would just never have been "good enough" to release.

[[TV]]

No offense, I posted above setting the sound quality is effectively a one liner in PA (yeah, you'd think there's GUI for that in 2019, but that would be DE's responsibility, not PA's). And I hope we're not talking Creative here. These things are iffy on Windows as well.

PA's "killer feature" is that it actually allows setting the volume per stream, so you can dial down whatever you run in the background when you need to let something else play louder. It's not a silver bullet, I hear (pun intended) JACK is still the go-to solution for low latency audio. But the features you need in 2019 from a modern desktop, PA delivers.

When did Creative do prosumer products? I was talking about M-Audio. Though I kind of cheated with that one since I think the OSS4 developers got the specs straight from M-Audio when they were dabbling with their highly successful and even more popular commercial license adventure. So those drivers are pretty solid for those cards.

That PA's "killer feature" has been in OSS4 forever. It's called vmix. Vmix also has a Production quality setting (though you need to enable it in the sources) which does higher quality resampling. You can even set that in a GUI (ossxmix) though I one-clicked that setting to the desktop panel.

I gave up trying to do any DAW work in linux many moons ago. It just made me too miserable. So I don't know if JACK server still crashes all the time and as a result, every program connected to it has to be restarted. Native linux version of Reaper gives me some hope though. Then again I'm a little worried how the super low latency thunderbolt audio interfaces will ever work properly in linux environments.