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Topic: [SOLVED] getting rid of pulse audio (Read 20664 times) previous topic - next topic
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Re: getting rid of pulse audio

Reply #60 –
Quote from: Sero – on
Confirming, I just built a Gentoo desktop with no systemd, no pulseaudio, with working xorg/firefox.
No, most people would not want to do that (myself included).

A fried my laptop back in 2004 emerging the world... that's why I moved to Arch. Back in the days of i686, optimizations made a big difference; not so sure about now.

Re: getting rid of pulse audio

Reply #61 –
Quote from: MilkCow – on
Although systemd crept into xorg server, gentoo users can simply disable systemd globally in every package.

Gentoo developers also forked udev as eudev. On gentoo linux, if you build firefox, firefox supports ALSA.

Don't worry too much. My gentoo system is free from systemd and pulseaudio and elogind although I couldn't break free from dbus. Even BSD desktops can't break free from dbus, either.

If you want non-trivial customizations or want to avoid RedHat desktop softwares as much as possible, Gentoo is the only linux distribution for you.


I've killed dbus.  I use wmaker and don't need that junk. I can use mount and can read dmesg.  The biggest problem is what I need for CUPS.

Re: getting rid of pulse audio

Reply #62 –
Quote from: mrbrklyn – on

One thing though, is it is increasingly harder to just find a stream link and plug it into a video player.  They are doing their damnedest to track you and tie you down.

Yeah that's the biggest problem. Video in browsers is one of the crappier things about the modern web. I'm not sure what your normal habits are, but I only ever watch video on youtube (on occasion) which thankfully can be easily grabbed with youtube-dl and sent to mpv. Youtube-dl works on some other sites as well, but in general I just don't listen to any audio or watch any video in browser.

Re: getting rid of pulse audio

Reply #63 –
Quote from: Sero – on
This has been an issue for Gentoo users who (used to) have a choice regarding compile flags, and whether to use oss/alsa/pulse/jack or whatever they wanted, but the truth is, this has  to be handled by Mozilla, it's not a distro thing, maybe we should all start seriously bugging the Mozilla Foundation about it... There are enough people who don't want pulse, for both philosophical and practical reasons (resampling, for one). There are people saying v57 could be compiled against ALSA again, but it's probably not high up on their priorities list.

A lot of times, for youtube and other *tube sites, I use youtube-dl, on firefox you can install the 'open with' extension and point it to mpv or smplayer, it will automagically invoke youtube-dl in the background and start playing it outside the browser. It's dirty but it works.

On a side note, I was looking at an alternative to Android (sailfish) ... and it looked interesting, but it's using systemd+pulse. What the actual F#(&^$(#&$....


I have no pulseaudio package installed. I do have libpulse. The sound in Firefox works (62.0.2). The sound in Waterfox works (56.2.3).

The arch Firefox package is built with an --enable-alsa flag.

It is worrying that this alsa support may be removed in the future but at present it works fine. Pulseaudio is an optional dependency
I must be missing something ?
 

Re: getting rid of pulse audio

Reply #65 –
Quote from: mrbrklyn – on
As was already discussed, that is also unwanted.
The reason I posted is there seems to be an acceptance that Firefox does not have sound without pulseaudio but it does , by default , on Arch and therefore Artix.

From what I can gather the only change made at the time it was widely reported that Alsa support had been removed from Firefox was that Alsa support was no longer compiled in by default. Leaving it up to the distros to enable Alsa support which Arch did.
Whether or not Alsa support will actually be removed in the future time will tell. I hope not.

The main Firefox binary doesn't actually link libpulse and as such Firefox will run, and produce sound with alsa, with libpulse removed,

I just checked and Firefox will fail to compile with no libpulse installed but you can disable pulse in the configure options and then it compiles fine.

However many other programs do link to libpulse and therefore fail to start once it is removed.
The list of binaries linked to libpulse on my system is
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So for me, as I like the KDE / Plasma Desktop, it would be a lot of work to attempt to rebuild all of this to remove the libpulse requirement when in effect it is doing nothing. No Pulseaudio server, no Pulseaudio.

I do accept that you may have your own, entirely valid, reasons for wanting to purge your system of all traces of pulse and I would imagine it's entirely possible.

As others have suggested Gentoo would allow this. Personally when I tried Gentoo a long time ago it got very old , very quickly, constantly re-compiling everything.

Or you could just make your own custom PKGBUILD's to remove Pulseaudio where possible. And if it proves problematic with some programs then resort to alternatives.
Thankfully you won't have an issue with Firefox at present

Re: getting rid of pulse audio

Reply #66 –
Quote from: gripped – on
The reason I posted is there seems to be an acceptance that Firefox does not have sound without pulseaudio but it does , by default , on Arch and therefore Artix.

From what I can gather the only change made at the time it was widely reported that Alsa support had been removed from Firefox was that Alsa support was no longer compiled in by default. Leaving it up to the distros to enable Alsa support which Arch did.
Whether or not Alsa support will actually be removed in the future time will tell. I hope not.

The main Firefox binary doesn't actually link libpulse and as such Firefox will run, and produce sound with alsa, with libpulse removed,


It doesn't which is why this was posted a few months back.  I switched to palemoon at the time.  The sound stopped working.  If it works now, I can't really tell you.

Re: getting rid of pulse audio

Reply #67 –
Quote from: mrbrklyn – on
It doesn't which is why this was posted a few months back.  I switched to palemoon at the time.  The sound stopped working.  If it works now, I can't really tell you.

Mate i'm not asking you to tell me. I was offering some feedback. To you and anyone else who reads this thread that sound is working on Firefox, through Alsa, on Arch or Artix. That is all :)

Re: getting rid of pulse audio

Reply #68 –
If you build from source, the following configuration options regarding audio are available (from FreeBSD ports "make config"):
Code: [Select]
 │ │ [ ] ALSA              ALSA audio architecture support                    │ │  
│ │ [ ] JACK              JACK audio server support                          │ │  
│ │ [ ] PULSEAUDIO        PulseAudio sound server support                    │ │  
│ │ [ ] SNDIO             Sndio audio support 

As I don't know how, could somebody perhaps build Firefox with ALSA support and put it on AUR, to support the pulseaudio-less people here?

BTW, sndio works great in Firefox.

[EDIT by an admin: code tags]

Re: getting rid of pulse audio

Reply #69 –
Quote from: recluce – on
If you build from source, the following configuration options regarding audio are available (from FreeBSD ports "make config"):

                               │ │ [ ] ALSA              ALSA audio architecture support                    │ │ 
                               │ │ [ ] JACK              JACK audio server support                          │ │ 
                               │ │ [ ] PULSEAUDIO        PulseAudio sound server support                    │ │ 
                               │ │ [ ] SNDIO             Sndio audio support 

As I don't know how, could somebody perhaps build Firefox with ALSA support and put it on AUR, to support the pulseaudio-less people here?

BTW, sndio works great in Firefox.


It works by default.

https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/firefox

Line 80
Code: [Select]
ac_add_options --enable-alsa

Re: getting rid of pulse audio

Reply #73 –
firefox still comes up asking for pulse audio in a bar accross the top.  Palemoon's sound works. 

Re: getting rid of pulse audio

Reply #74 –
Quote from: mrbrklyn – on
firefox still comes up asking for pulse audio in a bar accross the top.  Palemoon's sound works. 
Weird. It simply works for me.  I don't use it much except for playing Golf Clash on facebook :)
For some reason Chrome and derivatives have trouble registering mouse clicks in that game.