On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 01:39:11PM +0200, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult wrote:
> And just not caring about that lennartware crap at all. Not even wasting
> time w/ debates about that crap, over and over again. (and yes: that's
> really annying me)
>
> Why do you waste your precious lifetime w/ lennartware at all ?

Because so many upstreams of valuable software not only migrate to it but
also make it mandatory. It's all of lennartware, not just systemD. I have
been lucky to not need anything that uses to be infested with Avahi (they
say it's "needed" for printers), but PulseAudio puts its tentacles
everywhere.

You do know the story with Firefox; this time this happened to my favourite
audio player Clementine. The version in stretch/ascii is broken, I've had
the package on hold, and only now got around to investigate the issue.

In the WONTFIXed report, there's this gem:

hatstand commented Apr 19, 2016

I'd be happy if we just removed all of it tbh and just used pulseaudio
with no options.

Seriously, an audio player which doesn't care at all whether sound actually
works?! Especially that there's NOT A SINGLE REASON to ever use PulseAudio
instead of ALSA: it used to be that "cheap" sound cards could be opened only
once; this applies to basically all modern cards: they consist of just a DAC
these days -- but ALSA has a software mixer for more than a decade now.
Some desktop environments have a newbie-friendly setup widget that's
PulseAudio only but that's self-inflicted damage. As PA uses and requires
ALSA as the backend, it is not possible to have working PA but not ALSA --
while the converse is damn widespread.

Let's look at all machines with a monitor attached that I have:

* amd64 desktop. PA kind of works, except that when there's no sound, it
produces a noise, quiet but noticeable enough to be infuriating. It tends
to not be a concern during the day as there's enough noise from the
outside, but if I dare to have the speakers on during the night...
Problem 2: after suspend, all sound is high-pitched and clippy until
"killall pulseaudio". Problem 3: current version of PA wastes 12% of a
core even when idle. Not a show stopper, but on a laptop it'd be quite
nasty for the battery.
Obviously, everything works perfectly with bare ALSA.

* armhf laptop. Starting PA causes a kernel OOPS that also kills most GUI.
This is a kernel bug but one I can't fix -- it's stuck on a 3.0 sourceless
vendor kernel. Nasty but that's widespread in the ARM world.
Obviously, ALSA works just fine.

* arm64 laptop. No sound with PA, I did not waste time to investigate.

* amd64 desktop. Just compare it yourself: https://angband.pl/tmp/clem/
-- the samples have been recorded over a jack-to-jack analog cable
(happens not just with clementine, also with mplayer, mpg123 and probably
everything else).

You can call both ARM boxes "unusual", but what about two ordinary x86 ones?
With a 4-of-4 statistic, I guess such problems can't be rare for others.
Thus, inflicting PulseAudio even on non-technical users is sabotage.


Meow!
--
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ A dumb species has no way to open a tuna can.
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ A smart species invents a can opener.
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ A master species delegates.