Leaving the Desktop Market

[Alexey Dokuchaev]

On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 03:10:22PM -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> FreeBSD desktop since 3.3 (makes me a newbie!) I really dislike pulseaudio
> and have managed to live without it. Firefox works fine without it.
> Unfortunately they dropped OSS support a while go, so I now must use alsa,
> but it works well and without the pain of dealing with pulseaudio, a
> solution in search of a problem it I ever saw one.

PA should just die, of course, just like that kid's other "products".  OSS
is so nice; it supports all those nifty features like per-application mixing
and stuff, we have a very strong implementation of it (kudos to ariff@, let
me remind us all: http://people.freebsd.org/~ariff/SOUND_4.TXT.html).

Giving Firerox back its OSS support is my on TODO list, unfortunately I do
not have any idea when (or if) I can look at it, but that would be a nice
step in dealsificaion of our Ports Collection.  OSS was, and should remain,
the standard Unixish sound system API.

> Audio output is pretty system dependent, but I had little problem getting
> my audio to auto-switch to headphones when I plugged them in. The setup is
> a bit ugly,but I only had to check the available PINs (ugly, ugly) and set
> up stuff once. It just works.

Not always, unfortunately.  I also had a working pin override configuration
in /boot/loader.conf, but after r236750 (major snd_hda driver rewrite) it
stopped working.  I've reported it and tried to get some support from mav@
but he never replied.  Since then, I have to carry pre-r236750 version of
snd_hda(4) to have working sound.

> Power is an issue and I find the current defaults suck. Read mav's article
> on the subject on the wiki.

>From reading that article, I've only added hw.pci.do_power_nodriver="3" and
hw.pci.do_power_resume="0" to /boot/loader.conf.  More aggressive settings,
like cx_lowest="C2", made my laptop very sluggish and unpleasant to operate;
powerd(8) behaves sanely with no tuning, so I wouldn't say that our current
defaults suck.  The reason why we're behind on the "green" lane is because
we generally do not pay much attention when it comes to power-saving during
development of FreeBSD.  (I'd like to be proven wrong.)

./danfe