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https://www.devuan.org/os/announce/chimaera-release-announce-2021-10-14
Dear Friends and Software Freedom Lovers,
Devuan Developers are pleased to announce the release of Devuan Chimaera
4.0 as the project's newest stable release. This is the result of lots of
painstaking work by the team and extensive testing by the wider Devuan
community.What's new in Chimaera 4.0?
* Based on Debian Bullseye (11.1) with Linux kernel 5.10.
* Your choice of init: sysvinit, runit, and OpenRC.
* Improved desktop support - virtually all desktop environments available
in Debian are now part of Devuan, systemd-free.
* New boot, display manager and desktop theming.
* Enhanced accessibility: installation via GUI or console can now be
accomplished via software or hardware speech synthesis, or using a
refreshable braille display, and Devuan Chimaera has the ability to
install desktop environments without PulseAudio, allowing speech
synthesis in both console and GUI sessions at the same time.
"without PulseAudio", eh? Speculations on the reason for that are welcome, he asked them knowingly... -- Ed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 15 2021, @11:35AM (7 children)
I wish I could get rid of PulseAudio, which only exists to cause problems. The problem isn't physically getting rid of it - I use Gentoo which allows that - but that not having it causes problems with software that has hard dependencies on it. I can't, for example, get Discord sound to work without it. At all. I ended up launching a Windows VM once to use it. A few games (mostly those about three years old and using Unity) have hard dependencies. Of course, PulseAudio itself just causes audio problems and occasionally falls over and just spews static, which forces me to relogin.
Everything is horrible and it's all PulseAudio's fault.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by acid andy on Friday October 15 2021, @01:14PM (2 children)
In my book if a piece of software has a hard dependency on PulseAudio, then it's probably a piece of software I can do without. I don't like Unity very much either. If it's a killer app that won't run but it's open source, I might have a go at commenting out all the dependencies I don't want until the code will run, then look at replacing them if they're features I badly need. That's the joy of open source.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Marand on Friday October 15 2021, @08:30PM (1 child)
You might find pipewire interesting. It's intended to be a unification of sorts of the ideas of JACK and PulseAudio, with the added bonus of not being managed by Poettering. I've heard it's quite good as a PA replacement, but I haven't had the opportunity to try it myself. Basically a way to finally bring a lot of the benefits of JACK to more mainstream use, which I approve of beause JACK is by far superior but it's just annoying enough to use that it never really got much adoption outside of pro audio type use cases.
Also, regarding Unity, it's interesting, because stuff created with Unity works a lot better on Linux than Unity itself. The editor was such a nightmare to use on Linux a year or so ago when I checked it out; I've heard it's improved some, but it'll take a lot to make it actually nice to use. Not that it's awesome anywhere else but it had so many basic broken things about it on Linux, I got frustrated and abandoned it almost immediately. By contrast, stuff made with Unity tends to at least work pretty well, though there's a tendency for minor Unity updates to break things. Likely because Unity editor itself is such a clusterfuck.
Godot's a way better experience. The editor's built in the engine itself, so it runs just as well on Linux as the engine does, and gives a lot of confidence in the engine. It's a good sign when the engines being dogfooded like that. The current stable versions aren't quite as good in 3d stuff, but it's a better 2d engine by far, actually has some use for non-game applications, and the next major release is supposed to bring a lot of 3d improvements.
Just sucks waiting for Godot 4. (Sorry, not sorry.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 17 2021, @08:36PM
Frankly Pipewire is gross. It has no reason to exist except that Wayland, unlike X11, can't by default be remotely operated.
So Pipewire has come about to allow network access of Wayland DEs.
For audio, it would have been better if effort was focused on the software mixer in Alsa, and Jack for advanced needs.
The only real "problem" with Alsa is the handling of transitory audio devices like Bluetooth and USB headphones.
And that could be handled by software mixers that can reroute the audio as needed as devices show up and vanish.
But as JWZ put it, CADT. Linux will never get anywhere without strong guidance because programmers will always want to work on something new if left alone.
(Score: 5, Informative) by DarkMorph on Friday October 15 2021, @08:52PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 15 2021, @09:34PM
Ooh, cool, I have to check that out. Currently I have to run PA for Zoom.
(Score: 2) by corey on Friday October 15 2021, @10:36PM
Gentoo here as well. I had to install PA when I installed signal-desktop-bin from memory. Otherwise have managed to avoid it.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday October 18 2021, @04:12AM
There's a software package that provides a pulseaudio interface for software that demand it, but uses ALSA to emit the sound. An adapter, if you will.