[conspire] no audio to headphone

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Akkana Peck (akkana at shallowsky.com):

> I don't recommend [purging pulseaudio and installing ALSA] now, for
> one important reason: firefox sound output depends on pulseaudio, and
> I think all the other major browsers (like chromium) do too. So if you
> remove pulseaudio, you might be able to run some music players, but
> you won't ever be able to, say, watch a youtube video with sound.
> That's a showstopper for me.

Heard about "apulse"?  It's a shim atop ALSA that presents to any app
you "use with" a Pulse Audio software interface.  By "use with", I mean
do something like "apulse firefox" as a launcher for Firefox.

This reportedly isn't perfect, if only that you're back to the
old-school situation where a running application can "lock" the ALSA 
layers and (until quit) make sound unavailable to other sound-using 
apps.  But it's a clever kludge.

(Personally, I'm so behind the times on Linux sound plumbing that I 
distinctly remembering thinking that ossfree was all I needed.)

Most desktop users will, inevitably, prefer the Promised Land that Pulse
Audio purports to guarantee of all-singing, all-dancing sound
functionality delivered in one massively overengineered intermediate
layer.  

There are also competing sound daemons that are arguably more successful
than Pulae Audio at delivering on that promise, but the centrality of PA
in desktop Linux exerts a gravitic pull.  (That is emphatically _not_ 
an endorsement, just an effort to accurately describe current consensual
reality.)

> I wrote up what I learned about pulseaudio in the process of writing the script in a series of articles:
> https://shallowsky.com/blog/linux/pulseaudio-pavucontrol.html
> http://www.shallowsky.com/linux/pulseaudio-command-line.html
> https://shallowsky.com/blog/linux/pulseaudio-volume-cmdline.html
> And yeah, I know, it's a lot of reading. Sorry. Solving pulseaudio problems doesn't usually turn out to be simple.

No apology needed or (IMO) appropriate!  That is a very nice gift to
users.