apulse VS matrix.to

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

Happy to see this on HN =). Lunatik’s main author here. AMA.

Please feel welcome to join us on Matrix [1] as well.

[1] https://matrix.to/#/#lunatik:matrix.org

There is this list of 15-minute bugs that should be easy to tackle https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_severity=critical&bug_s...

Also strarting on smaller KDE applications is usually a great way to start, For example the Plasma widgets/applets or KDE games or educational applications.

You can join the New Contributors char room on Matrix to get help with starting out https://matrix.to/#/#new-contributors:kde.org

There's also https://matrix.to/#/#review-requests:nixos.org

Hi, I'm the Thib person mention in this article, and I agree that QA is super important. I can mostly talk about matrix.org, since I have little power over the Element clients. Disclaimer though: I'm technically employed by Element (to make paperwork simpler since I'm France-based, Element has an entity in France, and the Foundation is UK-based), but I'm working for the Foundation full time.

This kind of article is super valuable since it gives us the perspective of a new user. I opened https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/2178 to translate the gripes mentioned in the issue into actionable items for us. I took action on the most urgent one (updating the Try Matrix page), but want to take the time to go beyond the surface symptoms and address the root cause of the other gripes.

On the Foundation side, we're a small but mighty team of four. The website is currently maintained part time by me and a volunteer who is doing an excellent job at it.

As I wrote recently in a blog post "Tracking what works, not people" (https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/01/24-tracking-what-works/), I would love to have the resources to conduct user research and user testing on the website but I unfortunately don't. We deployed privacy-preserving analytics to see where people drop and what confuses them. It's not nearly as good as proper QA and user testing, but that's what we can afford for now.

Overall I'm grateful to the author for documenting their frustration, and even more grateful for reacting constructively to our responses and integrating them in the blog post! One of the strengths of open source is to find and address issues collectively. I consider this blog post to be a good open source contribution.

If people around believe in our mission and want to help us with their brainpower, I invite them to join our "Office of the Matrix.org Foundation" room: https://matrix.to/#/%23foundation-office:matrix.org

For those aligned with our mission and who want to support us financially, the https://matrix.org/support/ page should give you all the information you need to help us out.

https://matrix.to/#/#openbao-general:chat.lfx.linuxfoundatio...

Hi all,

This project release is a long time coming. It was a big uphill battle, and by far my largest endeavor so far. I built it for Sandstorm because I believe in Sandstorm's model, and I wanted to show that there's still life and potential in it. If you're inspired, joining our OpenCollective would be really helpful: https://opencollective.com/sandstormcommunity (keeping in mind that Sandstorm has now moved from its original leadership to a community project https://sandstorm.org/news/2023-11-03-from-io-to-org).

You can also join our mailing list or connect on the fediverse: https://sandstorm.org/community (The IRC link is outdated, we've effectively moved to Matrix for now due to the libera.chat split: https://matrix.to/#/#sandstorm:libera.chat)

Also: I'm open for hire! You can see some of my skills in putting things together in this blog post. I'd love to work in something FOSS or OSM related, but not a requirement. I mostly do Python and Golang, with a bit of Haskell under my belt. Other projects and resume here: https://github.com/orblivion/me

I really appreciate you sharing your concerns, and for all the hope and energy you've put into Matrix to date. Very much to your point, we're not yet in a state where I recommend Matrix to friends and family. Right now I only use it with people in FOSS and other circles where folks are a little more patient with the tech.

Only time will tell, and of course I'm biased as the Matrix.org Foundation's Managing Director, but I think there's good reason to remain hopeful:

The spec continues to evolve with major improvements expected in feature set and performance in the next year as we get to the 2.0 spec release, the Foundation is staffing up and beginning to fundraise, we're on the cusp of holding our first ever community elections to seat a Governing Board, and adoption has continued doubling on an annual basis.

I invite you and anyone else who is invested and/or concerned to join us in the Foundation's new office room – it's a way to get a view into ongoing activities, ask questions, provide direct feedback, and celebrate all the little wins on our way to collective success: https://matrix.to/#/#foundation-office:matrix.org

Cool! Just in case you haven't come across this, we've got a (rather quiet lately) chat that might be useful.

https://matrix.to/#/#usb-rs:matrix.org