DragonFlyBSD Decides To Drop PulseAudio

Written by Michael Larabel in BSD on 20 August 2016 at 08:39 AM EDT. 54 Comments
BSD
DragonFlyBSD developers have decided to remove PulseAudio from their dports packaging system and patch their desktop software to not depend upon this open-source sound server.

Running PulseAudio on DragonFlyBSD appears to cause problems for users, similar to PulseAudio in its early days on Linux, "the pulseaudio server didn't seem to work and even caused one CPU to spin at 100% usage. Moreover, it seems that firefox, even if built without pulseaudio, would detect if PA was installed and use it over ALSA resulting in no sound and a spinning CPU," according to John Marino who removed PA from DragonFlyBSD.

PulseAudio is no longer present in DPorts, Mozilla software is all built without PulseAudio, and GNOME/Cinnamon were patched not to build sound components making use of this sound server. A number of other ports had to also be dropped since they weren't working without PulseAudio, such as some GStreamer plugins and Empathy.

More details on the PulseAudio troubles in DragonFlyBSD land can be found via this mailing list post. PulseAudio has a chance of returning to DragonFlyBSD if its issues can be addressed.
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