Sound on Linux Anti-FUD: Calm, Certainty and Confidence

"Modern Multi-user Desktop

"So, these days a modern, multi-user desktop is quite a different beast to what it once was. Components such as Console Kit track which users are currently active (e.g. when more than one user is logged in simultaneously) and tells udev to write appropriate ACLs to enforce this policy. Users also want to use network attached sound systems, such as Apple Airtunes (RAOP) devices and UPnP media renderers etc. not to mention Bluetooth devices. All of this is much further up the sound stack than the low level driver level and has to deal with various permission and authentication schemes. This obviously needs a userspace component to govern this interaction. Something has to be responsible for this and a "sound server" of some sort obviously fits the bill perfectly.

"PulseAudio

"So enter PulseAudio. It's had it's fair share of bad publicity, but ultimately this important part of the Linux sound stack is taking on several roles that are important in a modern desktop. It's dealing with several different things:"

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