why does the terminal start pulseaudio?

[Piscium]

On Sun, 5 Jul 2020 at 21:10, Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net> wrote:

> My guess is, that xfce4-terminal starts pulseaudio to simulate pcspkr
> for bell usage. If you start any bloated DE, such as Xfce4, there's no
> need to guess. Almost all, if not all bloated DEs default to the
> pulseaudio sound server.

Thanks for the detailed answer. That is a good hypothesis, that the
xfce terminal wants to use the bell. Funny enough in my test neither
xterm nor urxvt started pulseaudio, I guess they are more barebones.

> I'm on Arch Linux, too, but stopped using Xfce4. I'm still just using
> some Xfce4 apps, xfce4-terminal is not one of them. If you want a
> decent terminal, consider to build roxterm from AUR:
> https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/roxterm/

For many years I used an openbox session with add-ons, the main one
being the lxde panel and its plugins. However lxde became flaky as
development focused on lxqt and I did not manage to transfer my love
of lxde to lxqt and that is why I am now on xfce. After openbox and
lxde I tried i3 for about 3 months but found that tiling window
managers don't really go well with my usage pattern. So far I am
mostly happy with XFCE, but maybe could still go back to openbox one
day, who knows. I have been using xfce terminal for many years but
lately I have been trying different terminals so may switch to
another.

> FWIW I'm using the two mentioned dummy packages. I'm using plain ALSA
> and on demand the jack sound server.

I was tired of pulseaudio flakiness so I started using Jack for
everything except browsers (as neither firefox nor chromium supports
jack) and system sounds. I could live without the latter but I do need
sound on the browsers. Hence why I still use pulse. So far my solution
of a Jack bridge for pulseaudio seems to be solid, only had problems
in the last couple of days for some reason.

> I've got https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/apulse/ installed, but
> don't need it. However, it might be useful, if you want to get rid of
> pulseaudio.

I also considered apulse however I looked at their github sight and
they say there some issues and unimplemented features so I decided not
to try it.

> Fortunately my desktop PC has got a PC speaker, so I'm using it
>
> [rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ lsmod | grep pcspkr
> pcspkr                 16384  0

I get the same output of your command above. I will take a look at pcspkr.

Thanks.