8 ms·

Eh, Pulseaudio. One of those things that on the rare occasion it's worked out of the box it's then broken with one step of the beaten path. Evidently it seems

by zh3 4y ago

Eh, Pulseaudio. One of those things that on the rare occasion it's worked out of the box it's then broken with one step of the beaten path. Evidently it seems to work for many people, the trouble it's caused has far outweighed any benefit (plus I know quite a few people dropped firefox for chrome when it went pulseaudio only - is that still the case?).

klodolph 4y ago
I don't know what kind of audio configurations you've lived with. I do remember when PulseAudio seemed to be the source of many problems, but this was over a decade ago. One of the big problems is that the Linux audio stack is built out of components that rely on assumptions about the next lower level of the stack that are often untrue. You might assume that your audio hardware has a volume control, assume it can perform mixing, assume it doesn't change configuration, assume there's only one user, assume (or want to assume) it has a specific sample rate, etc. PulseAudio papers over this stuff and deals with permissions, so your applications can actually work. If you have sufficiently boring PC hardware and sufficiently boring use cases, the audio will just kind of work anyway, without PulseAudio. Linux audio has more than its fair share of problems in the stack, but in my experience, PulseAudio is more of a solver of problems and less of a source of problems.
- robonerd 4y ago
  > If you have sufficiently boring PC hardware and sufficiently boring use cases, the audio will just kind of work anyway, without PulseAudio. Introducing breakage, complexity and general fragility to the common case, which was previously working fine, will obviously make a whole lot of people upset.
  - esarbe 4y ago
    Linux audio was never working fine. It was a mess of broken drivers and incompatible implementations. I cannot fathom how people are able to repress the memory of how bad Linux audio was before pulseaudio.
    - robonerd 4y ago
      I never experienced any trouble with audio in linux before pulseaudio. There is no memory repression here; only gaslighting from you, telling me I experienced something I didn't.
      - Crysstalis 4y ago
        Have you by chance checked the bug tracker, or reported this bug, or attempted to do any debugging to find the root cause?
        JetSpiegel 4y ago
        That would required the "bug" to exist in the first place.
        robonerd 4y ago
        robonerd 4y ago
        "Why didn't you just become a pulseaudio dev if you hate pulseaudio so much" Get fucking real, I have better things to do with my life than waste time ingratiating myself with the likes of pusleaudio devs. "Audio stopped working" describes hundreds if not thousands of pulseaudio bugs, do you really expect frustrated end users to drop everything else going on in their life and spend weeks learning the ropes of this shit? Get real.
        Crysstalis 4y ago
        >do you really expect frustrated end users to drop everything else going on in their life and spend weeks learning the ropes of this shit Are you sure you're responding to the correct post? I didn't say anything remotely like this. I asked if you would report the bug or try to do a little debugging, like spending a few minutes up to an hour. You don't have to learn any ropes, the internals should be very familiar to anyone who knows C and has some knowledge of audio. If this is important to your job, the company should be willing to let you do this on paid time. This stuff is open source, you either have a support vendor you pay to fix these bugs, or your company assigns developers to fix them yourself. There is no other way it happens. It's not a waste of time if you actually fix the bug. And just to stress this, there is no other way the bugs get fixed. This is it. This is the whole thing. Some person somewhere does actually need to drop everything and go and start spending time fixing the bugs. No, it doesn't have to be for weeks. If you think a thousand bugs is a lot, well, yeah, it is. That's why you need to go take some initiative to give some information, to make your bug known and make it possible for anyone else to help. Otherwise, it blends in with all the other low-information bugs and it falls back on you to go fix it yourself. A bug report that just says "it doesn't work" with no additional information is not actionable, you need to provide more than that for anyone to be able to help you. If you become hostile after being asked to spend a few minutes reporting bugs, then it is definitely going to be impossible for anyone to help you.
  - vetinari 4y ago
    Audio in Linux before PA certainly wasn't working fine. Turning off your mp3 player and restarting your browser, because you want to play youtube via flash plugin? Sorry, but that's not fine. I had my share of hardware, and PA had problem with only one piece (a nettop with Nvidia Ion2, audio via hdmi). It turned out that the hardware couldn't really play 44,1 kHz audio, it's clock was too unreliable and resulted in drop outs. PA couldn't fix the hardware, but could resample everything to 48 kHz on CPU, and with that there was no playback problem. So yes, it exposed problems, and it forced to fix them. We are all better off today for that.
    - TylerE 4y ago
      By far the best sound experience I've ever had on *nix was FreeBSD's fork of OSS. Dead simple API.. the /dev/dsp device had software multiplexing so multiple apps was no problem.
      - sam_lowry_ 4y ago
        Alsa has it via dmix although not as the defaut. Probably because Lennaert.
  - klodolph 4y ago
    What kind of breakage, complexity, and general fragility are you seeing with PulseAudio? Can you elaborate? One big problem here is that the "good path" for audio without PulseAudio applies to a shrinking segment of Linux user base.
    - robonerd 4y ago
      Sound stops and doesn't work until I restart pulseaudio. You know, the usual. I think some people restart their whole computer and blame their drivers, but restarting pulseaudio alone is what fixes it nine times out of ten.
      - klodolph 4y ago
        Interesting. I'd still rather have that problem than the massive, massive problems I tend to have without PulseAudio. Only one app can make sound at a time, can't adjust volume at all, that sort of thing.
  - Crysstalis 4y ago
    Computer users are continually upset about a lot of things. That's just the way it is. If you work in the industry then that should make you happy, it means you will always be employed.
- zh3 4y ago
  Stock Asus motherboards with on-board (Realtek, IIRC) audio (I tried aftermarket cards, though mostly after giving up on PulseAudio). Separately the company I worked for ditched it as well due to the issues, to be fair though in tnat case since they only needed a single - reliable - audio output so there was no case of PA anyway.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    Yea that is because anything Realtek is an utterly brain-dead piece of crap and "quirks", and that on Windows. On Linux it's even more pain, mostly because OEMs don't bother to release the specific quirks their specialized Windows driver fork had applied. Don't even want to know how many Windows systems ship with outdated, possibly insecure Realtek drivers because the OEM long since stopped backporting fixes.
    - zh3 4y ago
      I appreciate that Realtek can be an issue, but on a few PCs they works solidly with Alsa so seems unlikely it's the kernel driver (restarting pulseaudio would bring it back, at least for a while). So it seems to me the issues are very much with Pulseaudio (rather than with the kernel).
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        Alternatively, Pulseaudio could be exercising different code paths in Realtek's firmware that Alsa doesn't trigger. With Realtek, all bets are open...
kyruzic 4y ago
Pulseaudio is one of the absolute best parts of Linux. Have fun routing audio from one stream to one device and another stream to a different device on Windows or macos!
- robonerd 4y ago
  > Have fun routing audio from one stream to one device and another stream to a different device on Windows or macos! I can do that with pulseaudio, but it's not fun.
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    I use to do that quite often with Pulse, and on Plasma it's just a matter of drag'n'drop in audio systray applet.
    - robonerd 4y ago
      Okay, I have two computers on my LAN right now, one running OpenSUSE with KDE and Pulseaudio, the other with Debian and Pulseaudio. I want to send my audio from the OpenSUSE computer to the Debian computer. What do I drag, and to where? There's nothing dragable in my systray that even mentions the Debian computer. I'm quite sure this process starts with me writing some config files on both of these computers. That's how it worked every other time I've tried these sort of things with Pulseaudio. These sort of tricks are possible for techies to do with Pulseaudio, but for the proverbial grandmother user they may as well not exist because the system as a whole certainly isn't going to make it easy.
      - seba_dos1 4y ago
        > I'm quite sure this process starts with me writing some config files on both of these computers. So don't be so sure ;) You just tick a checkbox in paprefs to enable networking (which is perfectly reasonable, as in most cases you don't want to have it enabled by default), and that's it. It finds the other PC via zeroconf and it shows up as a regular output device. Depending on distro you use, you may need to install PulseAudio's zeroconf module and make sure Avahi is running, but a properly configured desktop distro will have all that either by default or a single package installation away these days.

by zh3 4y ago

klodolph 4y ago

I don't know what kind of audio configurations you've lived with. I do remember when PulseAudio seemed to be the source of many problems, but this was over a decade ago. One of the big problems is that the Linux audio stack is built out of components that rely on assumptions about the next lower level of the stack that are often untrue. You might assume that your audio hardware has a volume control, assume it can perform mixing, assume it doesn't change configuration, assume there's only one user, assume (or want to assume) it has a specific sample rate, etc. PulseAudio papers over this stuff and deals with permissions, so your applications can actually work. If you have sufficiently boring PC hardware and sufficiently boring use cases, the audio will just kind of work anyway, without PulseAudio. Linux audio has more than its fair share of problems in the stack, but in my experience, PulseAudio is more of a solver of problems and less of a source of problems.

robonerd 4y ago
> If you have sufficiently boring PC hardware and sufficiently boring use cases, the audio will just kind of work anyway, without PulseAudio. Introducing breakage, complexity and general fragility to the common case, which was previously working fine, will obviously make a whole lot of people upset.
- esarbe 4y ago
  Linux audio was never working fine. It was a mess of broken drivers and incompatible implementations. I cannot fathom how people are able to repress the memory of how bad Linux audio was before pulseaudio.
  - robonerd 4y ago
    I never experienced any trouble with audio in linux before pulseaudio. There is no memory repression here; only gaslighting from you, telling me I experienced something I didn't.
    - Crysstalis 4y ago
      Have you by chance checked the bug tracker, or reported this bug, or attempted to do any debugging to find the root cause?
      - JetSpiegel 4y ago
        That would required the "bug" to exist in the first place.
        robonerd 4y ago
      - robonerd 4y ago
        "Why didn't you just become a pulseaudio dev if you hate pulseaudio so much" Get fucking real, I have better things to do with my life than waste time ingratiating myself with the likes of pusleaudio devs. "Audio stopped working" describes hundreds if not thousands of pulseaudio bugs, do you really expect frustrated end users to drop everything else going on in their life and spend weeks learning the ropes of this shit? Get real.
        Crysstalis 4y ago
        >do you really expect frustrated end users to drop everything else going on in their life and spend weeks learning the ropes of this shit Are you sure you're responding to the correct post? I didn't say anything remotely like this. I asked if you would report the bug or try to do a little debugging, like spending a few minutes up to an hour. You don't have to learn any ropes, the internals should be very familiar to anyone who knows C and has some knowledge of audio. If this is important to your job, the company should be willing to let you do this on paid time. This stuff is open source, you either have a support vendor you pay to fix these bugs, or your company assigns developers to fix them yourself. There is no other way it happens. It's not a waste of time if you actually fix the bug. And just to stress this, there is no other way the bugs get fixed. This is it. This is the whole thing. Some person somewhere does actually need to drop everything and go and start spending time fixing the bugs. No, it doesn't have to be for weeks. If you think a thousand bugs is a lot, well, yeah, it is. That's why you need to go take some initiative to give some information, to make your bug known and make it possible for anyone else to help. Otherwise, it blends in with all the other low-information bugs and it falls back on you to go fix it yourself. A bug report that just says "it doesn't work" with no additional information is not actionable, you need to provide more than that for anyone to be able to help you. If you become hostile after being asked to spend a few minutes reporting bugs, then it is definitely going to be impossible for anyone to help you.
- vetinari 4y ago
  Audio in Linux before PA certainly wasn't working fine. Turning off your mp3 player and restarting your browser, because you want to play youtube via flash plugin? Sorry, but that's not fine. I had my share of hardware, and PA had problem with only one piece (a nettop with Nvidia Ion2, audio via hdmi). It turned out that the hardware couldn't really play 44,1 kHz audio, it's clock was too unreliable and resulted in drop outs. PA couldn't fix the hardware, but could resample everything to 48 kHz on CPU, and with that there was no playback problem. So yes, it exposed problems, and it forced to fix them. We are all better off today for that.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    By far the best sound experience I've ever had on *nix was FreeBSD's fork of OSS. Dead simple API.. the /dev/dsp device had software multiplexing so multiple apps was no problem.
    - sam_lowry_ 4y ago
      Alsa has it via dmix although not as the defaut. Probably because Lennaert.
- klodolph 4y ago
  What kind of breakage, complexity, and general fragility are you seeing with PulseAudio? Can you elaborate? One big problem here is that the "good path" for audio without PulseAudio applies to a shrinking segment of Linux user base.
  - robonerd 4y ago
    Sound stops and doesn't work until I restart pulseaudio. You know, the usual. I think some people restart their whole computer and blame their drivers, but restarting pulseaudio alone is what fixes it nine times out of ten.
    - klodolph 4y ago
      Interesting. I'd still rather have that problem than the massive, massive problems I tend to have without PulseAudio. Only one app can make sound at a time, can't adjust volume at all, that sort of thing.
- Crysstalis 4y ago
  Computer users are continually upset about a lot of things. That's just the way it is. If you work in the industry then that should make you happy, it means you will always be employed.
zh3 4y ago
Stock Asus motherboards with on-board (Realtek, IIRC) audio (I tried aftermarket cards, though mostly after giving up on PulseAudio). Separately the company I worked for ditched it as well due to the issues, to be fair though in tnat case since they only needed a single - reliable - audio output so there was no case of PA anyway.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Yea that is because anything Realtek is an utterly brain-dead piece of crap and "quirks", and that on Windows. On Linux it's even more pain, mostly because OEMs don't bother to release the specific quirks their specialized Windows driver fork had applied. Don't even want to know how many Windows systems ship with outdated, possibly insecure Realtek drivers because the OEM long since stopped backporting fixes.
  - zh3 4y ago
    I appreciate that Realtek can be an issue, but on a few PCs they works solidly with Alsa so seems unlikely it's the kernel driver (restarting pulseaudio would bring it back, at least for a while). So it seems to me the issues are very much with Pulseaudio (rather than with the kernel).
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      Alternatively, Pulseaudio could be exercising different code paths in Realtek's firmware that Alsa doesn't trigger. With Realtek, all bets are open...

kyruzic 4y ago

Pulseaudio is one of the absolute best parts of Linux. Have fun routing audio from one stream to one device and another stream to a different device on Windows or macos!

robonerd 4y ago
> Have fun routing audio from one stream to one device and another stream to a different device on Windows or macos! I can do that with pulseaudio, but it's not fun.
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  I use to do that quite often with Pulse, and on Plasma it's just a matter of drag'n'drop in audio systray applet.
  - robonerd 4y ago
    Okay, I have two computers on my LAN right now, one running OpenSUSE with KDE and Pulseaudio, the other with Debian and Pulseaudio. I want to send my audio from the OpenSUSE computer to the Debian computer. What do I drag, and to where? There's nothing dragable in my systray that even mentions the Debian computer. I'm quite sure this process starts with me writing some config files on both of these computers. That's how it worked every other time I've tried these sort of things with Pulseaudio. These sort of tricks are possible for techies to do with Pulseaudio, but for the proverbial grandmother user they may as well not exist because the system as a whole certainly isn't going to make it easy.
    - seba_dos1 4y ago
      > I'm quite sure this process starts with me writing some config files on both of these computers. So don't be so sure ;) You just tick a checkbox in paprefs to enable networking (which is perfectly reasonable, as in most cases you don't want to have it enabled by default), and that's it. It finds the other PC via zeroconf and it shows up as a regular output device. Depending on distro you use, you may need to install PulseAudio's zeroconf module and make sure Avahi is running, but a properly configured desktop distro will have all that either by default or a single package installation away these days.