I see people complaining about it all the time, but I don't understand why...
Just note, that there's a silent majority who is happy about PulseAudio, because it solved their audio problems once and for all.
Here's my guess: 99% of people who are "happy with pulseaudio" don't know what it is. If it does its job well you don't notice it running, of course.
Partly because it was written by Lennart Poettering, creator of the controversial systemd as well.
Thats another thing I don't understand? I friggn love systemd!?!
Because it fucks with my soundcard, but ALSA doesn't.
ALOT of the hate comes from the past..... and memories of.
In the early days of pulseaudio it was a fucking nightmare, lockups, broken modules, crashes... etc etc etc.
Back then it was a 3 way fight, JACKed, ALSA, and Pulseaudio. Jacked was good for midi control and more pro level equipment, ALSA did a fair job with the right audio hardware... if you had an odd card though, good luck.
When pulseaudio came along it solved a alot of problems and issues ALSA had with dynamic control, sinks, and hooks (programming hooks) that ALSA had. However, it was about as flaky as Charles mansion. Alot of residual hate is because of those days, today Pulse mostly just works.
(Side note, its also some hate toward Pottering as well bleeding over).
It's built on top of ALSA, and as such just abstracts away most of the feature set away. Now don't get me wrong, ALSA is still a piece of shit, but at least it's not overloaded, slow and has heavy latency.
Because Lennart's easy to hate.
I'm fine with PA, I'm fine with Alsa.
Because their distro's audio manager sucks, and because they haven't discovered pavucontrol yet.
For serious, sudo apt-get install pavucontrol. It is the sound control panel you deserve.
Because it requires me to recompile programs to support it, and my system works better without it. Generally, it is easier for me to use ALSA/OSS alone without pulseaudio.
Part of the problem isn't with PA, but with programs that don't play nice with it, for whatever reason. MuseScore when running with PA, for example, blocks other programs from playing sound if they are opened after it, and leaving pavucontrol open prevents MuseScore from playing sound.
Never had any problems with pulseaudio that all the fuzz about anyway? From what I have heard pulse still seems like a hug step up from ALSA and OSS.
No, it Canonical fault, because they used it by default in Ubuntu, when PA was in early stage of development with many issues.
I am pretty new to linux, but I had to turn it off because vlc sounded like garbage.
if pulse and alsa are both pieces of shit (from what I've read) then what's a good alternative? I have had no problems with pulse or alsa
Because it crashes Steam and any game I try to use my microphone on.
Because it fails with wine and qemu. Both have better (or only) sound on ALSA.
Because it adds one more layer to the linux audio system to fix the errors of the lower layer (alsa) and make stuff easier. I mean, from the standpoint of pulseaudio this is fine, but shouldn't we at least try to fix the broken alsa layer (and believe me, it is broken)? I would argue that adding one more layer just duplicates a huge bunch of bugs and half fixes them.
More here (warning: probably controversial as fu**).
Simply because it never works out of the fucking box if you have a discrete audio card. Just put in a fresh Fedora 23 install and I have been chugging SOLIDLY for 48 fucking hours to get the goddamn thing to play more than one audio source without cross-volume control (controlling one source's volume through another volume slider [vlc volume controlling mpd but not playing its own audio]). It's a fucking travesty/nightmare. Every time. Every. Fucking. Time. I used to jump distros monthly, now I'm terrified to do it because I have to work on windows until I have time off - I can't work with no tunes, no fucking way.
Some people don't like it just because it's Poetteringware. Some people don't like it because it's bloated and inferior in many ways to ALSA.
Some people are okay with it.
Some people hate it because Ubuntu 12.04 implemented it too early and it was a broken piece of shit.
I play music with mpd running on my desktop/server. mpd plays music just fine through ALSA, and if other applications want to play sounds at the same time, they can.
Install PulseAudio, and whoop, now you have a... userland daemon that... ensures that applications... can play multiple sounds at the same time what is this nonsense anyways are there still a lot of people who bought their sound cards in 1994
And often, it doesn't work. Some apps just play sound with incredible, incredible choppiness. Even on newer hardware. Meanwhile, straight up ALSA works just fine.
And it's hard to say "no thanks, I think I'll uninstall this nonsense and just play audio straight through ALSA, trust me, I'm an expert, it actually works", because PulseAudio seems to make ungodly efforts to ensure that it's running and it's overriding every avenue of audio playback with extreme, extreme prejudice. Oh, and every single application depends on it. And not even in "also offer straight up ALSA as option" kind of way.
What I don't understand is, if people are pissed with PulseAudio "because it's broken", why don't someone go and fork it? I mean, you guys do that all the time, fix it at once instead of complaining about it being broken. Just pick up on PA again and fix all the bugs like you do with your distros and pretty much everything (must I remind the saying "RTFM" and how it is so ironic in this specific case?).
Obviously I can't speak for others but here's why I dislike it.
PulseAudio has always close to worked perfectly for me, there were some cases where it didn't work and that typically required a lot of work to fix it but for me it tended to have worked. This is in no small part because my system is simple. No login manager, just myself in the audio group.
Many people report that PulseAudio doesn't work for them however. And this is a similar trend with a lot of Red Hat/Lennartware. It often doesn't work. Why? Because this stuff is tied into a thousand configurations everywhere on your system which all need to be just right in order for stuff to not horribly break. This is a thing it shares with software such as systemd, NetworkManager, Avahi, Gummiboot and all that stuff.
In their attempt to create "just works" when everything is set up exactly right they created a fragile house of card that comes falling down when settings are only slightly off from what they want them to be. All these tools are basically designed with Fedora's target audience in mind. People who will never change a single thing about their system. Yes, if everything is set up by the distro and they accounted for all the hardware then it "just works", but if it doesn't "just work" it takes forever to diagnose and repair the problem.
Also, as far as PA goes, it has higher latency than bare ALSA.
Another thing that makes me more suspicious is that virtually all of this tech originates from Red Hat or GNOME-controlled Red Hat, and a company that likes to sell support of course wants a Linux that constantly breaks and which you can't figure out without a dedicated support guy. With this shit, RH is creating is very much creating a system where it becomes all the more attractive for companies to invest into their support contract, and I doubt that's not a bit on purpose.
Funny enough, this is a reminder of why to use linux. Because, unlike windows, we're able to remove the shit we hate, even if it requires some trouble.
Because it's a stupid never working breaking things that working piece of garbage?
They used ark btw.