mean_dean wrote:
does any distro require pulseaudio?
Probably not...maybe some gaming or multimedia distributions - don't know. But i do know Pulseaudio can be difficult to strip out of a system, so for me easier to use a distribution that doesn't have it pre-installed.
Interesting quotes from the Debian wiki, with parallels to systemd:
The sound stack in Linux has been the weakest link in Linux-as-a-desktop, and documentation on the web is often conflicting, out-of-date and dispiriting. Part of the problem is that pulseaudio was released before it was ready. The good news is that as of wheezy it pretty much works as advertised.
ALSA was working pretty well until the push to use pulse audio - pulseaudio was somewhat of a mess in squeeze.
Source:
https://wiki.debian.org/Soundand from:
http://tuxradar.com/content/how-it-work ... -explained :
There's a problem with the state of Linux audio, and it's not that it doesn't always work. The issue is that it's overcomplicated. This soon becomes evident if you sit down with a piece of paper and try to draw the relationships between the technologies involved with taking audio from a music file to your speakers: the diagram soon turns into a plate of knotted spaghetti. This is a failure because there's nothing intrinsically more complicated about audio than any other technology. It enters your Linux box at one point and leaves at another.
...sounds eerily familiar to the current state of Linux.
800mhz, 512mb ram, dCore-jessie (Tiny Core with Debian Jessie packages) with BusyBox and Fluxbox.
Most don't have computer access, reuse or pay forward an old computer.
