Comment 521 for bug 371897

(In reply to Rosanne DiMesio from comment #400)
> (In reply to Michael Gooch from comment #399)
>
> > audio issues on these distros when run in wine, DESPITE the distros
> > patching in winepulse support (
> >
>
> Doesn't that just prove that a winepulse driver is NOT the answer to the
> audio problems some users still have?

Following this logic, Wine is not the answer to run programs not natively ported on Linux, and it should've been dropped years ago.
This doesn't have to be perceived as criticism towards Wine of course, since it has improved greatly since it actually required a lot of work to make simple programs work on it. In fact, Wine is a good example of how something buggy can become more and more stable when people keep working on it... Wonder what would've have happened if the majority of its developers would've just said "screw developing Wine, just dual boot Windows" and dropped coding Wine.

Like it or not, Pulseaudio is a reality now (it has actually been such for quite a few years), and it is time to actually deal with it. Also, I'd like to note that alsa's support for pulse has always been buggy, and has made little to none improvement in the last years, at least not where it matters or enough to let wine provide a working, continuous and appreciable sound output. I understand it takes less effort to say "blame alsa-plugins, not us" than maintaining a proper pulse driver, but you actually already have some people who'd do that for you.

Also, please, stop pretending that at this point Pulseaudio can be dropped in favor of alsa. Doing that implies the loss of a good deal of features which may actually be essential to some users, and it is also quite foolish to suggest user to do so. What's the point of Wine becoming more stable and needing less and less tweaks to make programs run on it, when users would still have to do a good deal of tuning to force alsa into their systems (as long as it is still possible)?

Winepusle is buggy, yes, but it offers far better support to audio output than wine's alsa driver is doing right now. It's not perfect, indeed, but at least it offers FUNCTIONAL audio output. To be fair, I can't see how the issues that the current alsa driver is causing (from stuttering audio to the complete lack of it, passing through random and loud ear-unfriendly noises) isn't seen as a major (if not critical) bug, causing a good loos of functionality.

What's the point right now to keep winepulse out of Wine? It isn't doing worse than winealsa is, it'll make some people stop complaining, it'll save time for several packagers... And it wouldn't even mean the removal of winealsa, for those who don't want Pulseaudio on their system.

Please, just hear the users who have posted on this bug report since 2007: at first it was just a feature request, but as years passed it become something more, something necessary due to the evolution course of most Linux distros.