Desktop environments

[Linux for blind general discussion]

I use patchelf to make Firefox use apulse by default, and while I have
a few packages on my system that suggest or recommend pulseaudio, they
all work just fine with just libpulse, and these two are tiny compared
to everything the pulseaudio metapackage wants to install. Also, I
presently have nothing installed that depends on jack.

I'll admit, it would be nice if I could have Orca and YouTube speaking
at reasonable volume simultaneously without having to use
headphones(presently, having Orca speak normally leaves YouTube
Whispering even with YouTube's volume slider at max and having YouTube
at a reasonable volume leavs Orca shouting, though this only seems to
happen with my desktop's internal speaker and headphones seems to
equalize them).

Admittedly, I don't use my desktop for playing multimedia from local
storage and only use it for YouTube because I have nothing else that
can play YouTube, and if I did have something else that could play
YouTube, I'd ditch apulse since I'd be fine with a silent Firefox
otherwise, and if it wasn't for Firefox, I'd ditch the GUI all
together(Sadly, I can't go a day without visiting at least one website
that needs Javascript to work, and the navigational hotkeys Orca adds
to Firefox and other graphical web browsers are just too dang
convenient and I know of no way to get an equivalent feature in
text-only browsers).

Maybe I'm a bit obsessed with minimalism(I was an lxde user prior to
blindness, and even then, did as much from within lxterminal as I did
on the desktop, had a single panel in the style of Win9x, and had no
icons to mar my wallpaper), but I like having a root partition whose
contents could fit uncompressed on a CD, the Pulseaudio metapackage
and its dependencies weigh more than the heaviest application on my
system, and I've heard nothing to suggest pulseaudio provides benefit
proportionate to its size, but plenty to suggest getting it to do
anything might make my life harder(Admittedly, I'm hesitant to try
anything that messes with a working sound config, what with sound
being my sole means of output).

To each their own, but I'm quite content without it and intend to
resist efforts to force me to use it for the foreseeable future.