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Comment by kutkloon7 | Hacker News Reader

I am quite surprised that PulseAudio has a bad reputation. I couldn't get ALSA working on Arch Linux, and simply installing PulseAudio resolved all my issues.

From the sentiment here I get the feeling that it might stop working any moment.

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It's mostly historical - Ubuntu shipped it as the default when it was still unstable. This lead to a lot of people learning about it and lots of 'try killing pulseaudio if something goes wrong' advice.

The reality now is it is very stable and has a huge number of powerful features. Personally I think it is great, and have no issues with it.

That is the reason indeed. For years Pulseaudio was a pain in the backside to use - not just on Ubuntu but on Debian as well. I still dislike it and think it's overengineered but today it works pretty well to be honest; as long as your setup isn't anything too exotic.

In its initial (Ubuntu) release it would crash your desktop any time Firefox loaded a page that included flash content, which was a lot of pages back then. You had to choose between totally disabling Flash (again, kind of a big deal at the time) and attempting to excise PulseAudio and get Alsa's sanity back.

I chose the third way of dropping Desktop Linux. I just don't have time for that kind of crap anymore.

Part of the problem is that the early releases were pretty bad - sometimes even requiring patches that were only published in the Fedora package to work correctly (like, they literally hadn't upstreamed by the developers at all at the time). PulseAudio also didn't do bugfix-only releases, you either backported or waited for the next major release and hoped it didn't break anything else. They just released what I think is probably the first bugfix-only release in the project's history a couple of days ago. This certainly wasn't a case of the prior releases being so good they didn't need fixing either.

> PulseAudio also didn't do bugfix-only releases, you either backported or waited for the next major release and hoped it didn't break anything else.

Haha, that is ridiculous!

I had to laugh - I'm using Ubuntu, and every time I want to listen to music (or watch a video, or play a game) I have to pulseaudio -k, because for some reason it boots up with some horrid 8-bit 22khz distortion over it all.

I had the opposite experience with Debian Sid a few days ago. I'd been using ALSA for everything without problems, but I was getting annoyed with the forced animations in Evince so I installed Okular instead (which has no forced animations). This brought in a big collection of dependencies, including PulseAudio. MPV immediately stopped working, even after manually configuring it for PulseAudio output. But it turned out PulseAudio wasn't a mandatory dependency for Okular, so I uninstalled it and everything worked perfectly again.

okular is great for highlighting content etc but it is pretty resource-intensive.

On my 8 year old desktop system (8GB ram, 2.5GHz AMD Phenon II) it feels subjectively faster than Evince because of better UI latency. Resource-intensive is a good thing if the resources are used effectively, eg. for more aggressive speculative rendering, which seems to be the case. On mobile I might care a little more, but the forced animation in Evince (and a growing number of GNOME apps) is a deal-breaker, so I'd prefer Okular even on mobile.

It use to be terrible. Steam games would generate static, you'd occasionally get video/audio lag, etc.

I started really using it when I started using Linux laptops, just because it's way easier to connect bluetooth audio, ship audio over HDMI, etc.

It actually works pretty well now and I like it. Still hate and refuse to use systemd though. :-P

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