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PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

bugzilla.mozilla.org

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Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#51

Post by pdkl95 »

paulfurtado wrote: post #46
CaptSpify wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PulseAudio is pretty good these days and typically works out of the box for most need. Ehh...... I'll disagree with that. I have ~50% success rate of it working on my devices in the past 5 years.

A 50% success rate is pretty bad. May I ask what distributions you're using and which devices you've had trouble on? Are you using any special configuration? Most modern distros come with pulseaudio by default, which means I'd guess that over 90% of linux users use pulseaudio successfully. I've run workshops helping people install linux on their machines and I've never run into a system where pulseaudio did not work…

> come with pulseaudio by default

Which means they almost certainly include libasound.so, because PA still depends on ALSA in the kernel. Even in the case of distros that only use the ALSA emulation interface for PA, the traditional ALSA interface is still provided. Lots of software would break without that support.

It's more accurate to say most distros support both PA and ALSA by default.

> use pulseaudio successfully

Note that "successfully" doesn't imply "enjoyably" or "preferentially". I still hear complaints regularly from people that hate newer (PA-focused) distros that introduced a lot of latency problems. Movie audio sync became inconsistent (hundreds of ms latency, very high variability), and UI audio cues playing up to 3s (3000ms) after the visual changes.

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#52

Post by CaptSpify »

paulfurtado wrote: post #46
CaptSpify wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PulseAudio is pretty good these days and typically works out of the box for most need. Ehh...... I'll disagree with that. I have ~50% success rate of it working on my devices in the past 5 years.

A 50% success rate is pretty bad. May I ask what distributions you're using and which devices you've had trouble on? Are you using any special configuration? Most modern distros come with pulseaudio by default, which means I'd guess that over 90% of linux users use pulseaudio successfully. I've run workshops helping people install linux on their machines and I've never run into a system where pulseaudio did not work…

Mostly debian and ubuntu. Mostly Thinkpads, a couple of dells that I don't remember the model of, and a couple of compaqs. All of them standard builds. I've never added a soundcard that I can recall.

This is what bothers me so much about discussions about PA. There are legitimate problems with it, and whenever someone mentions them, everyone else chimes in to say that they are the minority, that they are doing it wrong, etc etc. This is how polarization happens.

I've had a much higher success rate with alsa ootb.

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#53

Post by djsumdog »

flukus wrote: post #50
djsumdog wrote: post #20

Firefox is cross platform. It has to support Win32/64 sound, Linux (alsa/pulse), whatever the hell FreeBSD and MacOS use .. Back in 2013 I had a lot of issues with Steam games not running correctly with PulseAudio (lots of static instead of sound half the time I tried to start a game). Sometimes doing a killall on the pulseaudio server would help, sometimes it would not. On that machine, I added a -pulseaudio USE fla…

> the KDE one Phonon? Wasn't that just a layer on top of pulse and/or alsa?

Had to do a few searches but I found it:

artsd (part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARts)

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#54

Post by djsumdog »

RSZC wrote: post #37
djsumdog wrote: post #20

Firefox is cross platform. It has to support Win32/64 sound, Linux (alsa/pulse), whatever the hell FreeBSD and MacOS use .. Back in 2013 I had a lot of issues with Steam games not running correctly with PulseAudio (lots of static instead of sound half the time I tried to start a game). Sometimes doing a killall on the pulseaudio server would help, sometimes it would not. On that machine, I added a -pulseaudio USE fla…

I do run MPD as a system daemon, can't recall having to do anything crazy with Pulseaudio...

Maybe your distro has it configured by default. I had to modify config (you can change the one in your home directory or the system on in /etc/pulseaudio/default) to include something like

    module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1
You could also use auth-anonymous=1 but if you're not careful with that, people can play stuff on your speakers. We use to mess with each other at work doing that. :-P

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#55

Post by djsumdog »

paulfurtado wrote: post #42
djsumdog wrote: post #20

Firefox is cross platform. It has to support Win32/64 sound, Linux (alsa/pulse), whatever the hell FreeBSD and MacOS use .. Back in 2013 I had a lot of issues with Steam games not running correctly with PulseAudio (lots of static instead of sound half the time I tried to start a game). Sometimes doing a killall on the pulseaudio server would help, sometimes it would not. On that machine, I added a -pulseaudio USE fla…

Note that by default in most distributions, pulse starts running when a user logs in, and runs as that user, but it can easily be configured to run as a system daemon instead to support multiple user sessions using it at the same time.

Yes, but ALL OVER the official documentation it says running it as a system daemon is not recommended at all. But yes, in the above use case, that would solve the issue of audio not continuing when switching X sessions without needing module-native-protocol-tcp.

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#56

Post by Zardoz84 »

CaptSpify wrote: post #29
widdma wrote: post #7

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.

> PulseAudio is pretty good these days and typically works out of the box for most need. Ehh...... I'll disagree with that. I have ~50% success rate of it working on my devices in the past 5 years.

And I have a 100% success rate. A single case don't means nothing.

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#57

Post by CaptSpify »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #56
CaptSpify wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PulseAudio is pretty good these days and typically works out of the box for most need. Ehh...... I'll disagree with that. I have ~50% success rate of it working on my devices in the past 5 years.

And I have a 100% success rate. A single case don't means nothing.

No, but I can demonstrate that there are problems. And judging by others in this thread, I'm not the only one. I find that saying "typically works out of the box for most need." is incorrect.

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#58

Post by CaptSpify »

Honestly, I get it. Alsa is not the future, unless someone steps up and maintains it. And it looks like that's not going to happen. I firmly believe that we should move on.

But part of moving on requires that we look at PA's problems. Everytime a PA thread comes up, people disregard and yell at everyone who has a problem with PA. PA has a bad reputation for a reason, and it's not just Pottering hate (though that's likely part of it). It's that PA is not good software. It needs to be fixed. And until it is, you'll have people wanting to go back to software that "just worked".

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#59

Post by AstralStorm »

CaptSpify wrote: post #58

Honestly, I get it. Alsa is not the future, unless someone steps up and maintains it. And it looks like that's not going to happen. I firmly believe that we should move on. But part of moving on requires that we look at PA's problems. Everytime a PA thread comes up, people disregard and yell at everyone who has a problem with PA. PA has a bad reputation for a reason, and it's not just Pottering hate (though that's li…

Wrong. ALSA is the main Linux audio backend. PulseAudio cannot output to sound devices without it. (only to network)

So not supporting it is akin to not supporting audio output on Linux.

Dropping PulseAudio is fine if they want to reduce maintenance load, as it is optional, unlike ALSA.

Re: PulseAudio requirement breaks Firefox on ALSA-only systems

#60

Post by AstralStorm »

Laforet wrote: post #47
dkbrk wrote: post #40

My system had been ALSA-only for many years, until this change forced me to install PulseAudio. About once a week the audio starts crackling and hissing, and I have to restart the Pulse server. Regardless of how old and unmaintained the ALSA backend was in firefox, it worked, and worked well; I never had a single problem with it.

One major factor is security, everything that isn't being actively maintained is passively accumulating exploits. For example, debian switched from ffmpeg to libav and eventually back to ffmpeg again because the libav maintainers have consistently slow to act on bugs and security holes whereas ffmpeg was anything but despite having a much smaller team looking after it. Debian's own security team called the switch bec…

ALSA itself is better maintained than PulseAudio actually.

If they cannot find a developer to maintain ALSA backend, they must really be out of money and skill. Yes, pure ALSA is harder, but not that much harder.

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