Hello, Gentoo. I've just removed pulseaudio from my main Gentoo system. Why? Several reasons:
(i) It's a "sound server", a description I don't understand. What does it _do_? Why do I want it? It seems to be an unnecessary layer of fat between sound applications and the kernel. (ii) I was having problems with the last 1-2 seconds being cut off audio streams from news sites. (iii) The provenance of the code; it's author is also udev's maintainer, the udev that has given most of us so much fun over the months. When might awkwardnesses start appearing in pulseaudio? By the way, I run sound stuff mainly in Gnome 2, using aqualung to play CDs and listening to audio files streamed or downloaded from the net. 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. :-) So, yes, I can recomment the removal of pulseaudio, unless anybody's got some particular need for it. -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
