What do DAW's based on other distros using PulseAudio do about it? Remove it, make it work somehow, or is there no such thing (a respectable DAW using PulseAudio)?

chris

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Fwiw removing pulseaudio entirely and then recompiling a handful of packages without it (Maybe more effort for xfce and kde users?) is trivial. If it matters so much for you then by all means you can and should make the effort to accommodate yourself. Also it seems that there are people making bluez work with alsa now and the original reason for including pulseaudio may no longer be valid. Of course since I lack any bluetooth hardware I can not test how viable this is.

Lastly, you also could just avoid using audio in firefox, with youtube-dl and other related programs most uses for audio in a web browser can be outright eliminated, I can't remember the last time firefox made sound here...

Emblems like these for my motorcycle tanks would be nice.

17th July 2018

With Microsoft and Apple security shutting down network protocols below SMB2, and Samba isn't able to allow us to browse in heterogeneous environments with Apple and Microsoft products, it would be nice if Dolphin was built with zeroconf support and Avahi was automatically included in the stable release. That would make our Slackware laptops and desktops more "network aware" in any environment they are placed. Cheers

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Haven't forgotten about this, but as I hoped, most module authors have fixed their code to work with perl v5.26.

Will continue keep an eye on this and write SlackBuilds if any are still required once a release looks to be near.

I suppose that depends on what one's standards are. There are 2 "hits" that come with Pulseaudio. The Jack Audio Connection Kit, a hard dependency for anything serious, has 2 versions, one for ALSA which is quite mature and fairly elegant and definitely powerful, and one for Pulseaudio which is new and is lacking 2 fairly important features of the ALSA only version. The second "hit" is roughly 8 times the latency. A person can get used to that but it is akin to insisting on using a dull saw. Some "Studio" distros and last I checked that even included Ubuntu, just don't ever install pulseaudio.

I have resolved to dedicate an OpSys just to DAW work so I can remove pulse with zero ramifications since DAW is all I boot it for. I kept it as 32 bit 14.0 Slackware until about 2 months ago when I upgraded in 2 steps to 14.2 but never installed Pulse.

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@orbea - Running Firefox without sound is simply unacceptable to me for many reasons, but there are at least workarounds and apparently the next Slackware release comes with Rust so compiling Firefox with --enable-alsa --disable-pulseaudio should be easier. If it's not I will just continue to use --- Firefox-fuckPA ---

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Thanks, enorbet :-) that github page links to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345661 which is fascinating reading.

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Pat already includes the --enable-alsa flag in compiling Firefox (although, obviously, it doesn't include the --disable-pulseaudio). Does having pulseaudio enabled when it isn't installed cause issues with Firefox, or are you just intending to keep up with your own versions regardless of what versions Pat pushes out?

I am a bit red-faced because I never followed that link until you pointed it out and it is great reading. Wow! I'm neither alone nor bonkers! Who'da thunk it? Thank you ttk, much appreciated.

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Hello again, bassmadrigal please accept my wishes for good health and happiness for you and yours. You have often helped me considerably. You are correct that there are a few bits of software that I prefer to update myself, regardless of what is offered and they are Kernel, nVidia drivers, and FireFox. That's pretty much the only bits I routinely manage myself.

I custom compile the kernel even if it is the same version as it is recommended to not use HUGE beyond initial install and Generic does not suit my needs. I don't like nor use an initrd and require performance options for DAW work. It's just frosting on the cake that it produces a "snappier", less complicated system especially for any multimedia application.

I update nvidia because I don't like nor use KMS and I appreciate that nVidia's installer script handles all the OpenGL libraries, both 64bit and 32bit that the specific driver prefers. It is a bonus that newer drivers are very often possible and sometimes the improvements are massive. In another thread I posted results from testing 3.90.25 versus 3.90.42 with Unigine Heaven 3D test suite and got a rather massive bump in performance (nearly 70% !!!), from 1464 with .25 to 2146 with .42. More importantly I can see and feel the difference.

FireFox has alternatives so it is of lesser importance but I did notice a substantial improvement in performance when Quantum was released and I'd like to be able to use that and benefit as it evolves into greater maturity. It is my understanding from your previous post that this will be easier in Current and the new release since Rust is included.

While I may prejudge the man, I don't prejudge his work but I'm a happy camper as long as I can keep my Slackware free of Pulseaudio and systemd and in that order. FWIW I do appreciate and acknowledge that some Freedesktop work is exemplary. I simply prefer to not suffer the intrusion and penalties of these two specific "services". Their cost/benefit ratio does not suit my needs.

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If you are the sort of person that cares enough to switch telemetry off then you don't count - they *can't* count you.

They work based on the data they have, which unfortunately is a self-reinforcing system - in effect they only listen to people that accept their default settings which includes telemetry.

Telemetry gets switched off here alongside anything vaguely search-from-the-address-bar-ish (my own peeve - I don't want every typo there bounced off a data-miner).

I have to accept that the ability to do this may dissappear one day - they can't count me or others that may do the same.

I have to hope that, somewhere within mozilla.org, remains someone that has considered this sort of usage and has enough clout to keep it in.

Overall there's a bit of damned if they do, damned if they don't at play here so, what should any team with non-infinite resources do?

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Sounds about right to me .. it's the far end of what delta-slack projects.

The main disruption I'm aware of that may throw projections off is the high rate of kernel churn being driven by the recent hardware-based security vulnerabilities. I think it's ramping up rather than leveling out.

That might have PV wondering whether it's worth it to release based on a kernel that's going to be completely obsoleted a few weeks later, and wait for things to settle down before issuing RC1.

Or he might just bite the bullet and release with a kernel with good other characteristics (robustness, good hardware support, LTS), I dunno. If we're looking at years of increased security-related churn, he wouldn't put 15.0 on hold for years waiting for it to stabilize, would he?

All speculation, and I may be projecting my own biases. We'll see what happens.

Not that there's any need to rush 15.0 out, anyway .. 14.1 is still quite viable, and 14.2 is looking like another good, solid release with at least as much longevity. He could wait another year or two and it'd be fine.

The first beta of Slackware 14.2 was released on January 13, 2016, and Slackware 14.2 was released on June 30. So unless we see the first 15.0 beta very soon, I don't think there will be a release this summer. (Not that I mind at all, just saying.)