Reverting to Alsa Sound System in Ubuntu

“Oh the fun! I removed package pulseaudio from my system this
morning and reverted to alsa, thinking this would fix my sound lag
problems on Doom 3 and Quake 4. It did, BUT… sound stopped
working in Quake 2, Quake 3, Open Arena, Urban Terror etc etc. I
was able to fix it eventually, but learned from my mistakes. As
usual I am here to stop you making the same mistakes .

“PulseAudio is a controversial addition to Ubuntu. PulseAudio is
a userspace sound daemon that brings many benefits to users, but it
is also problematic for others as well. For instance, many
experience audio latency issues and stuttering with it.
Applications like Skype seem to totally go haywire with it – yet
the developers keep forcing it down our throats.

“Although I’ve read various ways to disable PulseAudio, none of
them were particularly elegant. Some say to uninstall the
pulseaudio packages, but this will also uninstall the
ubuntu-desktop metapackage, which can break upgrades (and can even
prevent you from logging in). This was the first mistake I made,
and thankfully I realised it soon afterwards.”

Complete
Story