
PulseAudio is now required in Firefox Nightly - esaym
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247056#c163
======
tomjakubowski
I'm not totally sure what Firefox did here, but requiring libpulse isn't the
same as requiring PulseAudio. And the comments in that linked issue suggest
that this merely introduces a required dependency on libpulse.

The standard Chromium package on Arch Linux requires libpulse, but I run it
just fine on my laptop with no PulseAudio daemon. It seems like libpulse will
fall back to ALSA if the PA daemon isn't running.

edit: disclaimer: I know very little about audio on Linux, merely describing
my own experience and speculating wildly.

~~~
upofadown
A quick search revealed no fallback to Alsa built into libpulse. Here is the
discussion about Chromium where they are talking about doing their own
fallback to Alsa:

* [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=178101](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=178101)

------
namecast
For those of you dead set against using PA, you may want to look into this
project to emulate PulseAudio support for ALSA:
[https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse](https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse)

~~~
jay-anderson
Nice. I dread having to do any audio configuration on linux. I originally
hoped that pulse audio would move linux in the right direction, but in my
experience things are as messy as ever with one more ugly wart to worry about.
It's made me seriously consider purchasing a mac.

~~~
feld
Audio works great on FreeBSD

~~~
byuu
FreeBSD audio has been amazing for as long as I've used it.

You can also set these sysctl's:

    
    
        hw.snd.latency_profile=0
        hw.snd.latency=3
    

And then in your OSS code, use this ioctl:

    
    
        int cooked = 0;
        ioctl(fd, SNDCTL_DSP_COOKEDMODE, &cooked);
    

The result is that I have lower latency with multiple audio streams on FreeBSD
than I do on Windows using WASAPI exclusive mode (where your application takes
sole control of the sound card.) Pulseaudio on Linux ... doesn't even come
close to either in terms of latency. Easily a 60+ ms latency penalty, which is
definitely noticeable in video games.

And the code to output OSS audio is _way_ simpler and easier than WASAPI,
ALSA, and Pulse. Even easier than Pulse's simple API wrapper.

~~~
jay-anderson
I hadn't even considered any of the BSDs (it's for servers in my mind - a
stereotype :) ). I'm definitely going to give it a go. I have a small
recording setup in a spare room to play with which is currently running linux.

------
Etheryte
The decisions Firefox has made over the last years make less and less sense.

~~~
esaym
I'm still happy with them as a browser. But not sure now if they force PA on
me. I've tired to use/install it (PA) before, but I couldn't stand the PA
process hanging around in the background eating 20% of my cpu...especially on
laptops.

~~~
Alupis
> PA process hanging around in the background eating 20% of my cpu

Sounds like a misconfiguration if anything.

For a typical user - PulseAudio "just works" and there's no more to it than
that. It does make large improvements over just plain ALSA, and as far as I
know, is included in all the major Linux distros... so many folks use it and
never even know nor think about it.

~~~
officialchicken
> For a typical user - PulseAudio "just works" and there's no more to it than
> that

Nope. Sleep mode, no matter what distro you use, causes issues from 2008 until
today [0][1][2]...[n]

[0]
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Troubleshoot...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Troubleshooting)

[1]
[http://askubuntu.com/questions/762816/ubuntu-16-04-changes-s...](http://askubuntu.com/questions/762816/ubuntu-16-04-changes-
sound-device-after-suspend-how-to-fix)

[2]
[https://www.linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=13979](https://www.linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=13979)

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
Seems fixed
[https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93946](https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93946)

------
therealidiot
It sounds as though the code for plain old ALSA is still there though, so if
you're building from source you can still enable it

...phew!

------
SysArchitect
How is sound handled on FreeBSD? Or is FreeBSD going to be required to port
and ship PulseAudio?

~~~
Sanddancer
PulseAudio is cross-platform.. For FreeBSD in general, it uses further
development of Open Sound drivers, which have things like in-driver mixing
that Linux drivers under Alsa even lack.

~~~
wott
> _things like in-driver mixing that Linux drivers under Alsa even lack._

Uh?

~~~
Sanddancer
FreeBSD's sound drivers include software mixing, so that if there are multiple
things that want to use a sound card, they don't block each other. Alsa's
sound channels are blocking, which means that only one program at a time can
use the sound device, which is what causes the entire tower atop it to form.

~~~
digi_owl
Nope, Alsa has offered dmix for years now.

~~~
the_why_of_y
Which is not done in the ALSA driver, but the ALSA user-space library. In
contrast to that FreeBSD's OSS drivers do the mixing in kernel-space.

------
riffic
I got nothing against this. Desktop Linux needs to grow up.

~~~
digi_owl
It had already back in the early 2000s, now is turning senile...

------
digi_owl
In one word: NUTS.

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jwildeboer
Isnt PulseAudio Part of systemd anyway nowadays? SCNR ;-)

