On Thursday, 29 March 2018 8:11:58 PM AEDT Mark Trickett via luv-main wrote:
It seems that the backend is "Phonon VLC". Is it possible to have KDE use ALSA directly without such things?
Check and double check. Someone else was asking a while back about the Linux audio stack, on another forum, and I was digging around. Go looking for Pulse Audio, I think, certainly whichever it was, it had Lennart Poettering all through it, and trouble cooperating with other layers.
Actually I'm not totally set on using ALSA. But I do prefer to use something that allows me to control things via a text mode interface, if only to provide a good way of verifying that things work as desired. I don't mind things that Lennart does, they generally work and are usually adequately documented.
I know you have a preference for KDE styles, but it may be worth looking at "Mate" and "Cinnamon". Yes, time to install and look around, but a better idea of how they behave, and possibly better able to suggest which to choose for others. I tend to stick with the "traditional" style of Gnome, and I too will be looking around again in due course.
Thanks, I'll give it a go.
The other aggravation is that both the major desktops tend to have "tied" applications that share a family of libraries, and mix and match applications can bring in both sets of libraries, and even multiple versions of each, swallowing much disk space.
Plasmashell takes 300M+ of resident memory and up to 10% of a 64bit CPU core. While there are some overheads in having 2 separate sets of libraries I don't think it matters when compared to that. Current Linux desktop environments have features that compare poorly to OS/2 2.x (which ran nicely in 16M of RAM). Apart from managing dynamic network connections and dynamic devices (bluetooth and USB) the Windows 3.1 GUI satisfied most of the needs of most users and ran in 2M of RAM. As for ease of use, having to ask on a mailing list for something like this after spending a few hours fiddling and Googling is a serious problem IMHO. Changing sound volume shouldn't be a difficult problem to solve, and in earlier versions of KDE it just worked. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/