On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 04:45:01PM -0600, T.J. Duchene wrote:
> What is wrong with PulseAudio? I agree, it can be a PITA, but
> unless you are concerned about some kind of systemd dependency I do
> not understand why Devuan would be seeking a replacement. It's no
> worse than Jack or any of the other alternatives, which are less
> compatible.

I think it's better to think about what do we get to gain and what to lose
from pulseaudio.

Gains:
* ability to reroute streams mid-run (like, speakers->headphones), but only
if they are connected to physically separate sound cards
* a common way to direct streams (without, you need to read man pages and
learn obscure arguments that differ per program -- if a program has the
ability to use a non-default output at all)
* no need for manual configuration of certain outputs, like bluetooth
headphones
* can do basic configuration of certain commonish scenarios (like 5.1) for
you

Problems:
* new breakage (won't work if ALSA doesn't, is likely to fail on its own)
* buggy like hell:
* likes to take 100% of a CPU core for no obvious reasons
* on my box, needs to be killed after a suspend to get usable sound again
* on my box, randomly likes to introduce noise
* it is impossible to do non-basic configuration. For example, with 5.1,
you can not specify the routing matrix, and thus reorder channels, do
non-standard mixing, etc

In other words, it does significantly increase user friendliness while
providing little actually new functionality. On the other hand, unlike,
say, network-manager which is pure damage for non-newbies, pulseaudio does
give quite a bit of convenience -- unless you enjoy "mplayer -ao
alsa:device=hw=2.0" or Clementine|Tools|Preferences|Playback|GStreamer audio
engine|Output device|hw:2

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