The Great Pulseaudio Mixer Debate: a modest (productive) proposal

[David Woodhouse]

On Mon, 2009-04-27 at 16:09 -0400, William Jon McCann wrote:
> Actually, I think this is pretty close to the UI we want and, modulo
> the input selection and one or two other technical limitations that
> are being worked on, it should be nearly complete.  I designed it with
> help from Matthew Paul Thomas - and with oh a bit of inspiration from
> a popular and highly regarded operating system.  I feel very strongly
> that we shouldn't be compromising our designs to cater to the lowest
> common denominator of broken hardware and drivers - and definitely not
> for something as easy to fix as a unimplemented feature.

I like the UI; I think you did a good job.

But we mustn't lose sight of the fact that we can't always get
everything right -- there will _always_ be a need for users to tweak
something to make it work optimally.

For example, on the two laptops I've tried with PulseAudio on F-11 so
far I can't even turn the volume right up using your UI -- I need to run
a different mixer and turn the 'Front' slider to maximum, because it
starts on about 80%.

I think it's necessary to give _conditional_ access to the full
controls, even though I agree wholeheartedly that we shouldn't expose
all that mess by default.

I think that the compromise we've settled on for F-11, where there's a
completely different application buried in the menus which many users
might not even find, is quite a poor one. It should be properly
integrated.

-- 
David Woodhouse                            Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse at intel.com                              Intel Corporation