Eradicating PulseAudio

Eradicating PulseAudio

[Robby Zambito]

Hi,

Please help me eradicate PulseAudio from my system. It causes me nothing
but pain. My most commonly run commands according to my bash history are
pulsemixer followed by pgrep pulseaudio, which I use to debug my audio
issues, and pkill pulseaudio followed by herd restart pipewire which I
use to resolve my audio issues caused by pulseaudio being started by
Shepherd.

I don't need or want PulseAudio. The only reference I have to PulseAudio
in my system or home config is the following: 

(service alsa-service-type
         (alsa-configuration (pulseaudio? #f)))

In my system service configuration, with hopes to disable it
(unsuccessfully). I use %base-services rather than %desktop-services to
avoid the pulseaudio service that the latter includes.

How can I transform every package on my system to remove PulseAudio from
being an input? How can I stop Shepherd from starting PulseAudio against
my will, when there is no pulseaudio service in my home or system
configuration?

FWIW every package on my system is either installed through my system
config.scm or my home config.scm, so I can apply Scheme transformations
to every package easily.

I also see that there is an issue open to add a PipeWire Home
service[1]. I have a very similar service for my own setup that I wrote
myself. I skimmed through it, but I cannot see anything that actually
stops PulseAudio from loading. Does anyone know if this patch will just
resolve my issue?

Many thanks,
Robby

Footnotes:
[1]  https://issues.guix.gnu.org/63863

Re: Eradicating PulseAudio

[宋文武]

Robby Zambito <contact@robbyzambito.me> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Please help me eradicate PulseAudio from my system. It causes me nothing
> but pain. My most commonly run commands according to my bash history are
> pulsemixer followed by pgrep pulseaudio, which I use to debug my audio
> issues, and pkill pulseaudio followed by herd restart pipewire which I
> use to resolve my audio issues caused by pulseaudio being started by
> Shepherd.

Hello, you can disable the autospawn for PulseAudio by
put "autospawn = no" in ~/.config/pulse/client.conf.


It was not started by shepherd but autospawn by applications (eg: pulsemixer),
for reference:
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/Running/

Thanks.

Re: Eradicating PulseAudio

[Robby Zambito]

宋文武 <iyzsong@envs.net> writes:

> Hello, you can disable the autospawn for PulseAudio by
> put "autospawn = no" in ~/.config/pulse/client.conf.
>
>
> It was not started by shepherd but autospawn by applications (eg: pulsemixer),
> for reference:
> https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/Running/

Thank you for this tip. I thought it was being started by Shepherd
because the process becomes a child of Shepherd after it is auto
started. Adding this line to my configuration does help. PulseAudio no
longer aggressively starts itself if I stop my pipewire-pulse service.

Unfortunately some packages on my system (the primary package that comes
to mind I cannot specifically say, but it comes from a different
channel) depend on PulseAudio, and will manually start it if it is not
running when I start the application.

I am hoping for some way to do something equivalent to masking a package
in Gentoo[1], so I can avoid having PulseAudio installed at all. I
realize something like this might depend on package parameterization[2],
but if there is some hacky way to do this with the current version of
Guix, suggestions would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Robby

Footnotes:
[1]  https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Knowledge_Base:Masking_a_package

[2]  https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2023/parameterized-packages-for-gnu-guix/