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

[Rémy Maucherat]

On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 3:38 AM, Lennart Poettering
<mzerqung at 0pointer.de> wrote:
> Juggling with numbers like this is pointless in a Free Software. We
> have no clue about our end users. All we have is common sense -- whch
> in this case is not that common apparently.
>
> Apparently dwmw2's dad plus Callum Lerwick are now what we should be
> designing our Linux desktop for. It's very hard to reach 95% of that
> group.

Reading the IRC log, the Fesco members technical arguments sound
limited, and do focus on legacy use cases. That's really 10 years old
stuff (CD line in - PC speaker was mentioned too - unused for me in
that timeframe ...), so if this does not represent less than 5% of
users, I wonder what will.

There might be a conceptual problem with this decision, which
perpetuates UIs that are throwbacks to the 90s. The main thing Fedora
has going for it is its technical vision (given it does not do
proprietary stuff, patented stuff, or DMCA violating stuff, usability
is somewhat limited for "dad" type users), where breakage is well
accepted on the graphics side, not so on the sound side it seems.

Rémy