apulse VS Vulkan-Docs

Most of my audio comes from Firefox, Steam, and other random miscellaneous programs. I'm wondering if I can rely on apulse for this? If I need to do some configuration that's more than okay, but if it's super buggy or hardly works then it's not worth the trouble. If anyone has experience with apulse I would love to hear more about it.

I read this and my first thought is "oh shit, is Firefox about to stop working?"

some of us like our software to be stable and reliable, and not switch to the newest bullshit just because they can. I'm still bitter about being forced to find a workaround for FF requiring pulseaudio. Am I now gonna need to find a workaround for this? I run FF 94 right now, and will upgrade with trepidation...

(shoutout to https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse. THANKS.)

Rather than re-compile firefox, maybe take a look at https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse which provide a shim to eliminate pulse.

Firefox does use PulseAudio for output. I don't run an ALSA-only setup, but I believe you can use apulse to emulate PA over ALSA for specific applications like so: apulse firefox

When launching the binary set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include the oldlibs directory, e.g. LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/badsector/oldlibs. Some very old games may also need older versions of C++ library, you can find those in some older distros' "compat" packages, e.g. this one from SuSE 9.1 will contain most files you'll need - do not install the package, just extract the needed files. A few games may need convincing to use these files, use LD_PRELOAD for that. In addition some games may use OSS instead of ALSA so you'll need a wrapper. An OSS-to-PulseAudio wrapper is often available and you can preload it either with padsp (which will only work with the native version though, so no 32bit apps in 64bit linux) or doing it manually with LD_PRELOAD (which is basically what padsp does). There should be OSS support module for plain ALSA too if you do not have/want PulseAudio (or you can extract the relevant libraries from the padsp and use them with apulse).

apulse?

I think there are a lot more than your two solutions, for example there is apulse to run pulseaudio applications on top of ALSA. Of course your bluetooth headset will probably not work well with that, you'd still need another daemon like pulseaudio or pipewire to get good results there.

I don't think that's important. In practice you can also use the pulseaudio API and that will work everywhere because of this: https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse

This has been a life saver for me on GNU/Linux https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse

Pipelines (or in general terms PSOs) are the most problematic aspect of Vulkan / DX12 - much more than synchronization! Large parts of the gamedev industry seems to recognize all the performance issues with pipelines and therefore companies are experimenting with newer models like the VK_EXT_shader_object extension ("Vulkan without Pipelines": https://www.khronos.org/blog/you-can-use-vulkan-without-pipe...).

I've written a detailed comment about this before here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37843946#37845431) but for a much more comprehensive explanation by an engineer from Nintendo read the initial proposal for the VK_EXT_shader_object extension: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/blob/main/propos...).

There's also Casey Muratori's mail to the Vulkan advisory on 2015 that basically predicts this whole clusterfuck would happen: https://github.com/cmuratori/misc/blob/main/vulkan_dynamic_s...

Apple -> MoltenVK is an emulation layer and doesn't give you as much control as using Metal directly.

Nintendo and Sony prefer their own APIs, NVN and LibGNM, and AIUI Vulkan is a second-class API on those platforms which does not offer as much power, it is widely understood studios use NVN and LibGNM to get access to the real hardware on those platforms.

Windows/AMD/NVidia/Intel -> HW manufacturers tend to prototype and release new features with D3D first and then 'backport' them to Vulkan after a while. DirectX 12 for example had mesh shaders for over 2 years before Vulkan got a vendor neutral extension for them[0]

Android and Linux are the only platform where Vulkan is a first-class citizen.

You could maybe argue Nvidia treats Vulkan as a first-class citizen because they tend to have vendor-specific Vulkan extensions for the latest features available before anyone else. But otherwise, no, Vulkan is not a first-class API anywhere except Linux and Android.

Graphics API wars are alive and well.

[0] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/issues/1423