Parent seems to have been experimenting this issue recently. Saying "PulseAudio got fixed" does not mean "it works perfectly for everybody" (see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=813407 ). Most people will care more about getting a sound system which works without crashing and not sucking up CPU before getting sound system with streaming. The fact that you and me have had a good experience with it does not mean other people are not having issues with it (just as their bad experience may not reflect the overall quality of the software).

That's a Fedora bug. It wouldn't be bleeding-edge (enough!) if it didn't crash. Running Fedora and complaining in a public forum about crashes (without saying the distribution name in the first place!) makes no sense to me.

"without saying the distribution name in the first place"

RHEL 6, Fedora 16, Mint 11 (while it was not obsolete), Ubuntu Maverick Meercat (amongst others)

Oh ok, so Fedora users just have to suck it up and having a crashing system? Congratulations, you don't know anything about distros.

"you can set up PulseAudio for LAN audio streaming with padevchooser (GUI)."

Yes, and? I understand this is a useful feature for some people, but I'm just interested in listening to music and PA does not me allow to do that without frequent crashes and bugs

I don't care about the features of a car if it stops working at random. And yes, this has happened on every distro I tried since PA started being bundled. Every single distro, every single machine I've had only a stable system with PA OFF

Bugs can be fixed. Pulse is newer than Alsa and more complex, you should expect bugs. If you don't have a problem with the implementation details of PA (software mixing, optional software equalizing, networked audio, stateful audio adaption to devices) then just report the bugs and make it better. Don't whine and try to fragment the Linux space any worse than it already is, especially with Mir's announcement.

The real question is why did you need something newer in the first place ? Are years of bugs, misconfigurations, random crashes worth the minimal improvement end-users will get in the end (when everything finally works for everyone) ?

Yes, pulseaudio has all sorts of awesome esoteric features. You can stream sound transparently from a linux box to a windows one. That's kind of useless if it brings down your computer.

Yes, I should expect bugs soon after release

But PA is 8 years now.

I don't remember any software being so problematic as PA in the Linux world. Some have more problems, yes, but they usually have a limited deployment.

Flash Player? You didn't have problems with that?

Of course I did. Still less frequently than PA

> you can set up PulseAudio for LAN audio streaming with padevchooser (GUI). Could you do this with ESD?

Considering that was pretty much the point of it, of course.

The point of ESD? It wasn't nearly as user friendly if I remember correctly. But I was a KDE user.

Oh, didn't realize you were asking about the UI specifically. I believe you would just set an environment variable of where you wanted the sound to go.

The part I liked was that you would start ESD and everything just worked.