Why not remove pulse?
Pretty please: explain to me what the alternative is? Live without sound? Because your average user (say, my wife with her nice shiny Ubuntu Dell laptop) cannot fix the sound any other way. Even I had extreme trouble getting pulse to work at all, and I’m an experience developer, who can look at the code. Is there some magical incantation that my wife can use to get this extremely important portion of her computer working? Afterall, without sound, a laptop is fairly useless to most people.
And don’t talk to me about minority failures. This is the single most common sound chip, in a fully supported laptop that shipped with Ubuntu. Please. Explain how she can fix it, if she can’t remove pulse. Besides, say, switching back to Gentoo, which lets you remove it.
This has been a party broadcast on behalf of the “Don’t break my computer with no way to fix it” party.
*Update*: I’m sorry for the rant, really. But this whole “You should love pulse so much you shouldn’t care you don’t have any audio. You can’t make an omlette without breaking eggs, afterall.” attitude has me seriously pissed off.
I’m running Linux Mint 7 “Felicia” on my laptop purchased from Linux Certified. Mint is a ubuntu derived distro. I have problems with pulse as well. I get a lot of the same impressions you mention about pulse. It’s so great. Well again, i disagree. I can barely get any volume using pulse. The laptop came shipped with Ubuntu Dapper IIRC and while the sound was quiet, I could actually hear it. After twiddling every knob and checking/unchecking every checkbox I could find, I finally was able to disable Pulse. Once I was running straight Alsa, I could once again at least hear sound. I then rebooted and good ol’ pulse was re-enabled. I run alsamisxer and I get 1 control, master. That slider is at 100, and I get a whisper from my speakers. If I turn it down, i lose sound all together when the slider reaches about 85. From everything I’ve found about pulse, it is supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread. Most everytime i see someone complain about pulse, most every response is that it’s the distro’s fault for not seting pulse up right. I don’t care whose fault it is, i just want to get some decent volume from whatever uses it, and a clear way to actually increase the volume.