Hacker News Reader

Comment by thequux | Hacker News Reader

Pulse was only really janky in the early years; by 2010 it was as solid as anything else in tech. Even then, it was absolutely an improvement over the previous system which either needed manual configuration per program to choose whether to use ALSA, OSS, EsoundD, or Arts with success of portaudio and other sound systems too keep things interesting. Even if you did get things working, I distinctly recall having to restart Firefox in order to play music because Firefox had the only available connection to the sound device.

View on HN

> by 2010 it was as solid as anything else in tech.

Nah, it stayed flaky well past then.

> it was absolutely an improvement over the previous system which either needed manual configuration per program to choose whether to use ALSA, OSS, EsoundD, or Arts with success of portaudio and other sound systems too keep things interesting.

No it wasn't. It was just one more annoying option in the list.

> Even if you did get things working, I distinctly recall having to restart Firefox in order to play music because Firefox had the only available connection to the sound device.

That was a misconfiguration that was possible to do in some systems, sure. There were plenty that avoided it.

Actually, I used ALSA without anything else for a long time until recently. I only needed to install pulseaudio because Microsoft Teams didn't work without it and I needed it for work.

I guess modern apps were developed against those APIs that they've become a necessity now?

If you want to keep using alsa with applications that otherwise only work with pulseaudio, you can try apulse[1].

When I used to use it, it worked nicely, but I started using pulseaudio around the time of its most recent release, when I got frustrated by having to tweak asoundrc to use a USB microphone, and being unable to figure out how to bump up its sample rate.

[1]: https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse

> Pulse was only really janky in the early years; by 2010 it was as solid as anything else in tech.

Then why was PipeWire introduced as a PulseAudio replacement, and why have so many people sung its praises?

I think more people continued to have issues with Pulse for far longer than you realize.

Pipewire is a weird case. It was made as a general multi media orchistrator, that includes video and audio. It takes a lot of stuff from different sources.

> Then why was PipeWire introduced as a PulseAudio replacement

One of them is putting more focus on permission management with support for sandboxed containers, which is kinda necessary with the direction the Linux desktop is going. But it also is just a backend, that supports jack, alsa and pulse interfaces, so it was mostly a drop in replacement for the applications.

Talk with the guy behind pipewire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_buKw1la_tg (4:34 for the motivation behind pipewire)

Pipewire was created to support containerized applications (with limited system access), to also support video, and to unify both pro low-latency audio (JACK) and regular low-power audio (PulseAudio). It might have been possible to retrofit this all into the PulseAudio project - but the authors decided to start from scratch. There are some interviews and talks on YouTube, they might have insights into why exactly that was the case. But I have not seen any indications that it was because PulseAudio did not work for what it was designed for.

I switched from Pulseaudio to Pipewire at the beginning of the year, and all of a sudden my laptop is so stable I no longer need to reboot it every month or so. It seems to just be better disguised nowadays, not really much better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com