1 Jun
2021
1 Jun
'21
8:08 a.m.
William Morder via tde-users wrote:
No purist here, good sir! I like whatever works;
whatever works better,
that will do. But I also like to feel that I am in control of my own
system. Whenever pulseaudio no longer bothers me by taking over my sound
system, then I might leave it there.
If everything just worked, and I felt in control of my own system, then I
would probably still be running Windoze or the rotten Apple. It isn't that
I set out to be "pure" with some preconceived notion; it just turns out
that the things that bother me tend to fall predictably into the same few
categories.
At some point in the future, I may change my mind on this or that;
otherwise, I will die and at last be freed from these infernal machines.
IMO it is much harder to make things work without pulseaudio than with. I
have the same mindset as you do and I found out that reading pulseaudio
documentation and finding out why things do not work helped me a lot.
Few years ago I cam to the conclusion (it was PA 10 or 11) that the version
was very buggy, but developers fixed the issues in v12. I compiled v12
myself and see all my problems were gone. Meanwhile with buster and PA v12
all is fine (Except some minors around bluetooth). Now I hear v15 is on the
horizon, so you can imagine developers are not sleeping.
Regarding PA taking control over your sound system. This is exactly how it
should work to benefit from PA. Let it go and enjoy. I am not advocating
for PA. I simply know it works just fine.
We had also few discussions on the dev list with Michele regarding kmix. It
needs some adjustments, but it is not possible to do them right now.
Michele did some improvements based on the patches one other guy (I am
sorry I forgot the name) proposed. So for myself I found out the best is to
use the custom setting for the master channel on the pulseaudio mixer set
as default (sorry for the cyrillic) and for the fine tunning I use the ALSA
mixer and pavucontrol. pavucontrol can control the individual volume of
specific application (firefox, audio player etc), which kimix still can
not. pavucontrol can also control how Bluetooth (mobile phone) is handled
by the audio system.
It indeed depends on the use cases, but more complex use cases require more
complex tools and I do not see a chance a purist can do them. In fact what
I see are advises based on 5y old experience with PA (perhaps version 10 or
earlier), which lead to even bigger issues and end up in loop of errors.
Of course the machine and the choice is yours.
I know that you guys are not the youngest and hope I could help with sharing
my experience.
