whither xfce4-mixer?

[Genghis Khan]

On Sat, 11 May 2013 11:50:46 -0400
Brandon Watkins <bwat47 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:15 AM, Genghis Khan <genghiskhan at gmx.ca>
> wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> >
> > May you detail what parts of Xfce are those that you want to support
> > PulseAudio in a satisfactory manner?
> >
> > Does your GNU distro use xfce4-mixer or another sort of mixer?
> >
> > Last time I used that distro (2008 or 2009), it had a bloated setup
> > and consumed too much memory in relation to what Xfce regularly
> > consumes, I had GNOME mixer installed and also gnome-panel when
> > xfce-panel was the default panel; I felt as if I am using a pilot
> > version of GNU/Linux.
> >
> > If I need PulseAudio in Salix OS, I install PulseAudio tools from
> > SBo[1] and mate-media[2] which has a fork of gnome-volume-control
> > (mate-volume-control) which is working well with PulseAudio.
> >
> > [1]: http://slackbuilds.org/result/?search=PulseAudio
> > [2]: https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-media
> > [2]: http://git.mate-desktop.org/mate-media/
> >
> > On Fri, 10 May 2013 11:06:45 -0400
> > Brandon Watkins <bwat47 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > >
> > > > OTOH, some users love to use Xfce without PulseAudio (ALSA
> > > > alone), and won't accept PulseAudio as a dependancy of
> > > > xfce4-volumed or xfce4-mixer. I understand them, since I used
> > > > ALSA alone for years before I could make PA work with
> > > > Timidity++ without any lag.
> >
> > PulseAudio can be a suggested/optional dependency.
> >
> > > I agree XFCE shouldn't make pulseaudio required because a lot of
> > > XFCE users probably do prefer using just alsa, but I think XFCE
> > > properly supporting pulseaudio out of the box is long overdue.
> > > Pulseaudio works quite well these days and is the default in many
> > > distros. On my system I've found pulseaudio to be a necessity for
> > > doing things like using my HDMI audio output (its a PIA to do
> > > with just alsa). It currently takes too much tweaking to get XFCE
> > > working satisfactorily with pulseaudio, luckily the xubuntu
> > > distro has done a good job of getting this working out of the box
> > > and thats one of the major reasons that its my XFCE distro of
> > > choice.
> >
> >
> > --
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> > 4 teh lulz... http://email.is-not-s.ms
> > _______________________________________________
> > Xfce mailing list
> > Xfce at xfce.org
> > https://mail.xfce.org/mailman/listinfo/xfce
> > http://www.xfce.org
> >
> XFCE4-volumed and XFCE4-Mixer both work poorly with pulseaudio. If
> you have multiple outputs (such as your integrated speakers and HDMI
> output, and you say, switch to the HDMI output, using your volume
> hotkeys will continue to change the volume on your speakers even
> though they are not the current output. And XFCE4-Mixer was fairly
> useless with pulseaudio last time I tried it, it would not allow me
> to set my HDMI device as output (selecting it in the mixer would have
> no effect, so I had to use pavucontrol). I also recall xfce4-mixer
> having big problems with muting with pulseaudio. If I muted the
> volume with my keyboard shortcut it would refuse to unmute, and it
> often showed inaccurate volume in the panel applet.

Agreed.

> Xubuntu isn't as bloated as I keep seeing people claiming. On my
> machine (and this is the 64-bit version) it only uses around
> 300-330mb of ram upon login (And I have some extra things running on
> startup like compton and cairo-dock).

I have heard that they have removed some unnecessary packages, which is
less troubling.

> For sound it uses ubuntu's sound-indicator in the panel instead of
> xfce4-mixer applet, and the "sound settings" link in the sound
> indicator opens pavucontrol instead of xfce4-mixer, and they use a
> fork of xfce4-volumed that uses pulseaudio so my volume hotkeys work
> great even with hdmi output.

This can be applied to any other distro with the needed packages be it
Debian, Slackware, Puppy Linux, Sabayon Linux etc.

> Aside from that it uses mostly standard XFCE stuff...It no longer has
> gnome-panel or anything like that installed...

Unfortunately, the reality is that Canonical treats to non-GNOME
desktops (current & trendy) as inferior desktops thus Canonical is
giving bad reputation to KDE and Xfce, which is disturbing and unfair,
especially when Canonical has attempted, and succeed at some degree, to
make Ubuntu to look like the mother of any other GNU/Linux distro
which is also false.

Salix OS (Xfce edition) takes between 50MB - 80MB at startup making
Xfce and even KDE (~100MB) attractive to those who are seeking
operating systems that are usable with older hardware.

Ubuntu is a bad marketing operation for itself, ruled by indecent men,
and I do not find it appropriate to give exclusive compliments on
Ubuntu that are really applied to almost any other Linux distro that
has the proper packages available.

P.S. I am well aware that until Ubuntu came about, GNU/Linux was
not friendly in managing Wireless interfaces in the GUI manner.

-- 
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