[stephen_g]

The only reason people hated PulseAudio was because Ubuntu shipped it as their default sound system a year or two before it was ready. Now it's a pretty mature sound system that works well (at least with all the Linux hardware I have)...

[toyg]

"A year or two before it was ready", people like Lennart were already advocating it as The One True Way for Linux audio, so I don't blame Ubuntu for jumping the gun.

Besides, looking at how things go in that area, now that it works well enough it will probably be replaced quite soon.

[andrewcooke]

i don't have an opinion on the larger fight here, but you have to disable pulseaudio if you want a fast startup in opensuse 12.1 (otherwise there's a 30s pause when the desktop starts). disabled, everything seems fine.

[tene]

FWIW, my laptop, running Fedora, boots to the desktop in 15s total, with pulseaudio. I would sooner attribute that to a problem with the suse init system (every time I've dug into the suse init scripts, I've found horribly absurd decisions) than I would pulseaudio.