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by Latty 3196 days ago
It's mostly historical - Ubuntu shipped it as the default when it was still unstable. This lead to a lot of people learning about it and lots of 'try killing pulseaudio if something goes wrong' advice.

The reality now is it is very stable and has a huge number of powerful features. Personally I think it is great, and have no issues with it.
4 comments
ashark 3196 days ago
In its initial (Ubuntu) release it would crash your desktop any time Firefox loaded a page that included flash content, which was a lot of pages back then. You had to choose between totally disabling Flash (again, kind of a big deal at the time) and attempting to excise PulseAudio and get Alsa's sanity back.

I chose the third way of dropping Desktop Linux. I just don't have time for that kind of crap anymore.

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duozerk 3196 days ago
That is the reason indeed. For years Pulseaudio was a pain in the backside to use - not just on Ubuntu but on Debian as well. I still dislike it and think it's overengineered but today it works pretty well to be honest; as long as your setup isn't anything too exotic.
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makomk 3196 days ago
Part of the problem is that the early releases were pretty bad - sometimes even requiring patches that were only published in the Fedora package to work correctly (like, they literally hadn't upstreamed by the developers at all at the time). PulseAudio also didn't do bugfix-only releases, you either backported or waited for the next major release and hoped it didn't break anything else. They just released what I think is probably the first bugfix-only release in the project's history a couple of days ago. This certainly wasn't a case of the prior releases being so good they didn't need fixing either.
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kutkloon7 3192 days ago
> PulseAudio also didn't do bugfix-only releases, you either backported or waited for the next major release and hoped it didn't break anything else.

Haha, that is ridiculous!

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dvtv75 3195 days ago
I had to laugh - I'm using Ubuntu, and every time I want to listen to music (or watch a video, or play a game) I have to pulseaudio -k, because for some reason it boots up with some horrid 8-bit 22khz distortion over it all.
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