Earlier quoted context omitted.
PulseAudio is pretty good these days and typically works out of the box for most need. Per app volume is an amazing feature and switching sinks is a breeze. I often play music on my stereo (mobo sound card) and game audio on some headphones (audio over hdmi through monitor). Being able to switch them around live is great. However, like systemd, PulseAudio large and opinionated so it's not everyone's cup-of-tea.
Sadly, pulse is also still quite fragile and has a massive latency. It’d be preferable if for Linux there was an audio server closer to what JACK is (although both JACK and JACK2 aren’t ideal either). (That said, I mix hardware mixing and pulse for my purposes)
PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
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Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
PulseAudio is pretty good these days and typically works out of the box for most need. Per app volume is an amazing feature and switching sinks is a breeze. I often play music on my stereo (mobo sound card) and game audio on some headphones (audio over hdmi through monitor). Being able to switch them around live is great. However, like systemd, PulseAudio large and opinionated so it's not everyone's cup-of-tea.
Sadly, pulse is also still quite fragile and has a massive latency. It’d be preferable if for Linux there was an audio server closer to what JACK is (although both JACK and JACK2 aren’t ideal either). (That said, I mix hardware mixing and pulse for my purposes)
The trade-off for latency in PA is lower power usage. I think most consume users are pretty happy that their sound system does not suck tons of energy just to offer sub-10ms of audio latency.
> JACK
AFAIK, PulseAudio and Jack 2 can work pretty seamlessly together thanks to a new dbus API (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Examples#Pul...).
Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
#23I'm in the same boat, Firefox 52 broke ALSA, and Plugins. I need both. So I'm permanently on 51. Mozilla: You are making a mistake, revert both of these decisions! For example see: http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1-kongregate/topics/716510-...
Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
#24Well, what did anyone expect? Mozilla has complained for quite a while that their ALSA backend hasn’t been supported or updated in years, and they don’t have the manpower to do so. (Especially with their marketshare falling below 8%). So, after calls for people to support it, this is the end result. It’d be delusional to expect them to support two audio backends, and completely rewrite both of them for multiprocess s…
Freedom has a high cost - attention, maintenance, and constant vigilance. This is something we are learning all too well in this current political climate in the US. It's something Open Source maintainers are learning as they climb in years and experience and their time becomes more and more precious.
We used to tell people like these folk "Patches welcome," but then we learned that they give us those patches... and literally never maintain any aspect of them, so now we're stuck supporting their useless, broken, out of date features for years on end.
Worse, some of them come with baked in security vulnerabilities, and still get left on by default because next to nobody knows what it actually does. But we sure as hell get yelled at when we try to remove those broken features - it becomes an uphill battle, every time. We've seen it for Linux device drivers for super obscure hardware, we've seen it for features in desktop applications and entire desktop environments, we're seeing it again in web browsers.
If you aren't using PulseAudio, you have fully accepted that you are willing to be on the fringe Mozilla made the right call. Freedom has a price.
[1]: by measure of software that I maintain on Linux - last I checked less than 100 installs reporting usage information use the non-Pulse backend, albeit I accept those same folk are likely the folk that would disable usage reporting, so we can never know with absolute certainty. I can't imagine Mozilla's numbers are greatly different than what I'm seeing.
Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
#25Well, what did anyone expect? Mozilla has complained for quite a while that their ALSA backend hasn’t been supported or updated in years, and they don’t have the manpower to do so. (Especially with their marketshare falling below 8%). So, after calls for people to support it, this is the end result. It’d be delusional to expect them to support two audio backends, and completely rewrite both of them for multiprocess s…
What an utterly ridiculous argument. You're implying that everyone using software has to keep track of every single upstream project, their mailing lists and requests. That doesn't even remotely scale on a personal level. There just aren't enough hours in a day to be able to read all those mailing lists, and that's assuming every end user even remotely has the skills to understand what is being discussed anyway.
As an argument, this makes no more sense than "Well it's an open source project, fix it yourself".
This kind of scenario is always going to end up happening.
Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
#26I gave up on Firefox at the end of last year, and I don't miss it at all. If I hadn't already done it, though, this would've sent me over the edge. (I do not and will never run Pulse on any of my systems.) Currently using a stripped-down version of Chrome, and web browsing has never been better. Edit: the downvoting on this site is goddamned baffling sometimes. What about my comment has you guys offended today?
Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
#27Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
#28I haven't used Linux as my daily driver for years but I've been looking at switching back recently. It seems a lot harder to avoid PA than it used to be.
Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
#29I had a brief panic at just reading ALSA. I haven't used the linux desktop in years, but audio was always such a pain. I hope things have improved.
PulseAudio is pretty good these days and typically works out of the box for most need. Per app volume is an amazing feature and switching sinks is a breeze. I often play music on my stereo (mobo sound card) and game audio on some headphones (audio over hdmi through monitor). Being able to switch them around live is great. However, like systemd, PulseAudio large and opinionated so it's not everyone's cup-of-tea.
Ehh...... I'll disagree with that. I have ~50% success rate of it working on my devices in the past 5 years.
Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems
#30Without going into the whole "to use or not to use PulseAudio" debate, the problem seems to be the fact, that backend which Firefox uses for audio doesn't have anyone who maintains pure ALSA case. So either they need drop pure ALSA support, to find a maintainer or to change the backend. The last two are clearly harder.