On Thu, Jul 02, 2015 at 01:21:15PM -0700, Gregory Nowak wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 02, 2015 at 11:47:55AM +0100, Klaus Ethgen wrote:
> > What will be the alternatives? ALSA never worked for me to a usefull
> > state. It has partly translated config files but not in the parser, has
> > always cracking sound and kernel panics. It lags the ability to play
> > multiple streams and more.
> >
> > On the other hand, OSS (OSS4) did always work and is the easier to
> > implement solution. It supports natively sound multiplexing and several
> > channels.
> >
> > Unfortunately some applications does refuse to work with oss, even
> > applications that was long OSS only (Teamspeak, commercial product)
> >
> > Pulsaudio was /one/ solution to mitigate that but no good solution as it
> > adds many problems with sound.
> >
> > So I am interested in the strategy, devuan will go here.
>
> I personally can't stand pulse, and I'm not the only one:
> <http://linux-speakup.org/pipermail/speakup/2013-June/058100.html>
> <http://linux-speakup.org/pipermail/speakup/2013-June/058102.html>
> <http://linux-speakup.org/pipermail/speakup/2013-June/058200.html>
>
> There is more where that came from. The only reason I tolerate it is
> because removing pulseaudio also removes gnome-core among others. I'm
> all for choice, and believe that those who want pulse in devuan should
> be able to install it. I would also however love to go back to the
> good old days of squeeze where some many things didn't depend on
> pulse, and I could get speech from orca with only alsa, or even just
> oss installed. Just my $0.01 worth.

Back in squeeze, a lot of the audio stuff depended on libpulse.
It just didn't require the pulseaudio daemon.
As an OSS4 user at the time*, to remove libpulse I found it necessary to
rebuild any audio software I used.
Fortunately for me, that was a *very* small list (mpg123, vlc | mplayer2).

*I used OSS4 because ALSA would require building newer alsa libraries,
and I didn't want to deal with an audio library from outside the repos.
Then I found that OSS4 Just Worked, and *also* had virtual mixing.

Thanks,
Isaac