Why pavucontrol is not installed by default?

[Bastien Nocera]

On Tue, 2009-12-08 at 14:05 -0500, Jon Masters wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-12-08 at 12:59 +0100, Tomasz Torcz wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 08, 2009 at 09:51:55AM -0200, Paulo Cavalcanti wrote:
> > > I did a clean install of Fedora 12 and realized
> > > that pavucontrol was not installed by default.
> > > I have two sound cards and I only got sound when
> > > I manually installed pavucontrol and used it.
>  
> > > Any reason?
> 
> >   pavucontrol is regarded as advance tool, but also partly
> > obsolete. Current gnome-volume-control superseded most of
> > its functionality: controlling different streams volume,
> > switching profile, outputs, fallback devices.
> 
> The new gnome-volume-control is so cut-down it's not useful to me. In
> the quest to be more Mac-like in removing mixer controls

No, it's in a quest of providing *solutions* to user's problems, and not
blindly showing everything the software and the hardware can do.

>  (and not even
> having any obvious "advanced" mode), I now have a choice of no audio or
> having full volume LFE output *and* whatever mixer level I have set for
> the master output.

The sub-woofer setting works fine here, what's the problem?

>  alsamixer works fine, but then I can't use the volume
> sliders on my desktop and it gets rather awkward.
>
> I still pine for the days of isapnpdump when I had to do all the heavy
> lifting by hand, but it worked 100% of the time.

You can still do all the heavy lifting you want. Install the old
gst-mixer, or whatever GUI alsa mixer, just don't expect it to integrate
with the desktop.

Cheers