Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Walter Dnes]

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 11:48:07PM +0800, Mark David Dumlao wrote

> Analogy:
> 99% of people aren't going to need a11y. But the whole point of
> installing it by default on most desktop systems is that you can't
> predict who will need it,
> and _it does not harm_ (or very little harm) > to the people who don't.
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On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 07:32:24PM +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote
> Hello, Gentoo.

 [...deletia...]

> (ii) I was having problems with the last 1-2 seconds being cut off
> audio
> streams from news sites.

 [...deletia...]

> So, I grasped the nettle, put in a negative pulseaudio use flag,
> unmerged
> pa and alsa-plugins, then rebuilt the 14 packages which needed it.
>
> Surprisingly, everything still works.  I now get those last seconds
> from
> my news streams.  :-)

On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 10:48:14AM -0400, Michael Mol wrote

> PA kinda worked in this scenario, up until I physically interacted
> with the USB audio device. If I plugged into that, *everything*
> would suddenly route through the USB audio device, despite my careful
> routing of different applications to different audio sources.

 [...deletia...]

> You know the sad thing, though? ALSA would support that configuration
> very well, too. It has enough internal routing and mixing logic that
> it'd work.

  And a Google search turns up a lot more cases.

> So your tradeoffs are:
> A) no a11y unless elected by user:
> - for the 1%: a11y is a pain to install

  How "painfull" is it to add "pulseaudio" to USE in make.conf and then
emerge --changed-use world

> because the user might not even be able to see the screen (very big pain)

  Are you seriously arguing that a linux system will black-screen at
bootup due to lack of pulseaudio?

> B) a11y for everyone unless elected removed:
> - for the 1%: they can use the system properly (no pain)
> - for the 99%: use a few megabytes more on their disk (very small pain)

  That is a strawman argument that avoids the question.  This is *NOT*
about "a few megabytes" of disk space.  It's about an extra layer on top
of the system, chewing up memory, slowing it down, and interacting with
other software to cause problems.  *THAT* is what it's about.

  New Windows machines tend to come with so many "craplets" that programs
like "PC Decrapifier" http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/ are necessary.
Android smartphones come stuffed with their garbage, and they have to be
rooted to get rid of it.  One reason I chose linux, and especially
Gentoo, is that it allows me to avoid stuff I don't want/need.  Thanks
to USE="-*" plus judicious USE flags, I've got an almost-6-year-old Dell
with a Core Duo CPU and an onboard Intel GPU running NHL GameCentreLive.
Think of USE="-*" plus ICEWM as my version of "Linux Decrapifier".

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications