Just curious, because I was thinking of using PulseAudio just for Firefox (which is kind of annoying). What's wrong with PulseAudio? Why did they stop supporting ALSA?
I tried PulseAudio some years ago and could not get everything to work. I'm sure if I really tinkered with settings/config files, I could - but everything was working with ALSA out of the box, so I didn't bother.
Pulseaudio is sold as easier to manage, but for me it simply wasn't.
The assumption is that people are running systemd, and Pulseaudio presumably works well with that. But I'm not on systemd. If my distribution had a simple way of running pulseaudio and have it work more or less right out of the box, I'd go for it. But it doesn't.
They stopped supporting it because no developer stepped up to support it - that's all. Apparently the Pulseaudio API is straightforward for developers, whereas dealing with ALSA directly is not.
Pulseaudio is sold as easier to manage, but for me it simply wasn't.
The assumption is that people are running systemd, and Pulseaudio presumably works well with that. But I'm not on systemd. If my distribution had a simple way of running pulseaudio and have it work more or less right out of the box, I'd go for it. But it doesn't.
They stopped supporting it because no developer stepped up to support it - that's all. Apparently the Pulseaudio API is straightforward for developers, whereas dealing with ALSA directly is not.