Using Salix Without PulseAudio...?

[brocashelm]

I'd like to not have any instance of PulseAudio running on my system. I can accept that it's a "necessary" component of some packages that I need, such as Mpv. On the other hand, Apulse exists, but I'm not sure why that would still pull in PulseAudio upon install... Wouldn't that somewhat be pointless to have, if PulseAudio is such a hard dependency on Slackware-based systems?

Still, I'd like to be completely reliant on ALSA for my sound, with Sndio coming in second (really great tool from OpenBSD). So far, what I do is disable PulseAudio on start, and ALSA's mixer is manipulated so that I can still get sound through my speakers and headphones sans a PulseAudio daemon.

[DidierSpaier]

There used to be a way to use only alsa in Slackware, but no more as I have answered a while ago in a Slackware forum.

Instead, in Slint pulseaudio is just not started by default, neither system wide nor by the desktops and pulseaudio redirects the audio streams to dmix, see here (discard the dot files, some cleaning is in order). I did that mainly so that blind users can switch for graphical environments with a tty and vice versa without losing speech (and still hearing their preferred music and yes, mpv can use alsa). speech-dispatcher is still there but doesn't hurt.

Anyway the current trend is to replace pulseaudio by pipewire but pipewire, although included is not set by default in Slint.

Just in case: that pulseaudio have been initially developed by LP is not a valid reason to hate it, IMO

PS I know you won't like Slint, too many DEs/WMs

[brocashelm]

Thanks for the confirmation. That really sucks that Slackware has made PulseAudio such a hard dependency. Over at Devuan, I know the libraries are inevitable to "keep", but they're just libraries, rather than actively running daemons. Still, 100% of the sound is ALSA, and I'm in paradise.

Just in case: that pulseaudio have been initially developed by LP is not a valid reason to hate it, IMO

Well, to me, it really is. I have never had a positive experience with using PulseAudio, randomly crashing and hogging up memory over time. I was happy when I realized that I could get rid of it completely in Debian and Arch GNU/Linux, so I've always defaulted to a pure ALSA setup. I don't like nor respect Lennart Poettering or the usual Red Hat-isms that has infected open-source software in the last two decades. I know D-Bus is inevitable at this point, but I have absolutely no need for Systemd, Avahi, or most of Polkit's "functions"... In fact, I have been able to use Xfce with ConsoleKit2 in place of Elogind and Udevil in place of Udisks2. It is a pain to use it without Polkit, but it takes a bit of manual configuration to get things like graphically shutting down or connecting to the Internet to work within the session.

I suppose that I'll just keep PulseAudio disabled (as mentioned already). As long as I can get pure ALSA, I won't complain (too much).