On Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 09:59:10AM -0500, dev wrote:
> IIRC Jack, ALSA and Pulseaudio are three completely different software
> stacks. Firefox, as compiled from mozilla, will only work with
> Pulseaudio. Their official reasoning[1] was:
>

>   "Make Pulse Audio a hard dependency on Linux so that we
>    reduce the problems and maintenance associated with
>    maintaining multiple audio backends."

>
> Whatever rationale is behind that decision is beyond me.
> I only know Firefox worked perfectly for me for over a decade
> and now it does not.

I really don't understand what Mozilla guys are smoking.

For any local audio, ALSA is _strictly_ more likely to work than PulseAudio:
as a layer atop ALSA, Pulse requires it -- thus, any Linux[1] machine with
working Pulse also has working ALSA. In the past, neither OSS nor ALSA
could handle multiple streams on "cheap" (ie, any modern) hardware, but
that's been fixed for a decade.

On the other hand, out of four screen-attached machines I've used recently,
Pulse works on exactly zero.

> I guess I am switching to Chrome. Another sad day for FOSS.

You don't want that pile of spyware, it lacks any basic privacy extensions
Firefox has.

> Many of my online classes do not allow downloading of the media
> to view in Mplayer or VLC so I am really stuck.

If you must, have Chrome installed for just those classes. I for one need
it for my bank as its page is Chrome (and possibly IE) only. Another WTF.


Meow!

[1]. In-kernel OSS supports only a handful of early-90s sound cards that are
also supported by ALSA; out-of-tree OSS4 doesn't TTBMK support anything ALSA
doesn't know either -- and OSS4 sucks so badly it is not a part of
stretch/ascii anymore. On the other hand, BSD has OSS but not ALSA.
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