Like i needed another reason to stay on 45esr and pondering moving to Palemoon permanently.

Frankly it seems like the Firefox devs could just hand the Linux branch off to the Gnome devs at this point.

How does this fit in with the current state of sound on Linux?

I'd guess that this would impact relatively few people if they're willing to require it.

I do most of the audio work on the Wine project.

I personally think it's a bad move to drop official support for ALSA. Not everyone can or wants to use PulseAudio, for various good and bad reasons. Supporting multiple backends also keeps you "honest," so to speak, preventing you from relying on certain behaviors or features that only some platforms support.

But, I can understand the practical arguments behind dropping support for ALSA. The ALSA API really sucks to work with. There's a fair number of bugs and device quirks and whatnot that you have to take care of as an application developer. Standardizing around PulseAudio means only PulseAudio has to care about those quirks, instead of every single application. In practice, the vast majority of users use PulseAudio; there's a small (but vocal) minority that don't.

So really there's no clear winner on whether to provide support for ALSA.

Like many Poettering products, PulseAudio polarizes. There's one minority of users with either quirky setups or just bad luck for whom it just doesn't work, so they have to stick with ALSA. One minority of users (including me) who really loves the features it puts on the table (e.g. per-app volume control, effortless network transparency).

And of course, there's a large majority of users who couldn't care less, and who will just choose whatever their distribution installs (which is why I think the most Linux users not using PulseAudio are on those distros which don't install any sound stuff by default, e.g. Arch).

"PulseAudio solves all your audio problems on Linux, except the ones you have."

> Like many Poettering products

I didn't know pulseaudio was a Poettering product, but I know very well that pulseaudio has been a nightmare for me over the years on most setups with a variety of linux boxes and distros. And the fix when an audio problem arise is simply to uninstall pulseaudio and use alsa.

Now that I know pulseaudio is Poettering work, this makes a lot of sense.

Pulseaudio, Avahi and Systemd are his. Seems to be directly or indirectly inspired by Apple.

I have seen claims that Network Manager is his as well, but so far i have found no clear link.

I'm definitely in the camp that takes whatever the distribution gives me. Of course, the choice of distribution is heavily driven by what I want from it (e.g., KDE desktop, etc). I've honestly never given any thought to what audio subsystem it uses.

Fortunately, OpenSuSE Leap appears to be a PulseAudio distribution.

What if one just wants basic audio as provided by ALSA

Actually quite a few people don't run PulseAudio, as you can see from comments in that bug and the amount of votes the Arch Linux task [1] gathered in a short time. This is definitely going to be a problem.

[1] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/53195

Well when firefox 54 will be out, we without a working pulseaudio will have no choice but to switch to a different browser (pale moon ? otter ? vivaldi?).

I suppose mozilla does not care enough about losing these fringe users to actually do something about it.

At this point i wonder if they care for anything but OSX, and are either letter Gnome dictate, or at the very least taking strong cues from that camp, about the future of the Linux desktop...