PulseAudio

David Zeuthen davidz at redhat.com
Tue Feb 27 22:26:42 UTC 2007


On Tue, 2007-02-27 at 16:56 -0500, xiphmont at xiph.org wrote:
> > I think it's a user preference really. We have this thing in g-p-m to
> > tweak this desktop-wide preference
> 
> I know it's fashonable to make this a session preference, but it isn't
> really. This is a decision it makes more sense to give to root.  But I
> don't care enough to argue.

That's the same as saying it's also root's choice what screen resolution
you run your monitor at (sadly, that's partly true today - you can't
make it larger until we get xrandr 1.2) or when you decide it's ok for
the system to suspend. Sure, these are system resources, in a OS
architecture sense, but keep in mind there's a user in front of the
system. Alice and probably 95% of all users don't care about the pop.
Bob (and Bob don't know anything about Linux nor what a configuration
file even is) and Monty does so we give them an easy way to fix this.

> ..and what happens during the transition?  It depends on the settings
> of each user combined....?

For a single seat machine it depends on the user whose session is
active. For multi seat, it's more complicated.

> > Anyway, the point is that this is the behavior we want, don't you agree?
> 
> I'd opt toward 'smoothest behavior in all cases' unless demostrated
> that a powered sound chip is causing measurable drain.  That's not an
> argument against full options being available regardless.

Every single watt counts. Ever wondered why you get less battery
run-time when running Linux?

All this talk about a system-wide PulseAudio sounds interesting but from
what I've seen in the Fedora repositories this is a bit from what we've
got today. In particular I'm concerned about labeling streams etc. from
different users and ensuring they can't interfere with each other. It
would be really good with a mail going into technical details about
this. Thanks.

      David





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