Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 8th Oct 2009 19:09 UTC, submitted by MadMAtt
Lennart Poettering, creator of open source sound server PulseAudio, was recently interviewed at this year's Linux Plumbers Conference. In this Q&A he details the latest PulseAudio developments and addresses some of PA's critics. Thanks to PulseAudio, the Linux audio experience is becoming more context-aware. For example, if a video is running in one application the system should now automatically reduce the volume of everything else and increase it when the video is finished.
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Member since:
2005-07-08
It's fun to see people blaming Pulseaudio for breaking things, but they won't mention the problems that the linux audio stack had and Pulseaudio has fixed. It also seems it's getting trendy to say that Pulseaudio sucks because the linux audio stack is not perfect.
And to try to look smart, people will suggest ideas like going back to OSS and kernel-mode mixing, just like the BSDs and Opensolaris, because it's the Unix Way (tm). Yeah, Windows and OS X have a much better audio experience than Linux, and Windows has switched from kernel-mode audio mixing to userspace audio mixing in Vista, but what they know? We should follow the lead of BSDs and Solaris and use OSS. Because, as everybody knows, those two are the desktop OSes most used in the world, specially by audio hardcore users. So indeed, Linux should try to follow their lead, since their audio experience is much better than what Linux, OS X and Windows have.
The thing is, myself I'm happy with Pulseaudio. And from what I've seen, most of people is also happy with Pulseaudio, because It Just Works. They don't even know it exists. For a long time it was experimental and young, but it's getting more and more mature, and it will mature even more, it will have even less problems, it will solve even more issues, and people will love it even more. The Pulseaudio haters can't change that, and that hurts them, but they won't stop saying everywhere that Pulseaudio sucks based in their experiences from years ago.
Edited 2009-10-08 21:04 UTC