PA replaced ESD – takes less resources and support per-app volume setting. It is crap? I don’t think so…

Please, report in there because Lennart Poettering doesn’t use openSUSE neither Novell’s bugzilla and will notice no bug report.

Upstream bugs should land upstream, unless it’s not about packaging .

Then, it immediately gives me this error:

Forbidden
TICKET_CREATE privileges are required to perform this operation

I’ll just report it in the Novell bugzilla against openSUSE for now, I guess.

Personally, I’m curious why making good things with KDE is always abandoned…

We had many great things implemented in GNOME, but even they’re desktop agnostic, they are not implemented/used in/by KDE…

I use mostly KDE, but that’s kind of discrimination…

However, just at a quick glance, it looks like there are a number of UI/UX issues in each dialog.

Here’s a quick list:

* Why is each dialog branded as PulseAudio, in a huge, useless header?

* “playback stream” and “output device” are pretty jargony, plus, I don’t understand why a person would want to right-click and move them around (referring to the tip).

* Most people want to adjust both the right and left channels at the same time. I don’t see an obvious way to lock them together (to adjust both at once). Perhaps a better UI metaphor would be to have one volume slider for both the left and the right and then a little widget (probably another slider) to adjust the left/right balance.

* The mute icon should probably be a mute button, with the word “mute”, perhaps.

* I don’t understand the speaker layout in the speakers tab. Is that supposed to be a dropdown? Why is it so wide? Shouldn’t there be a label to the left of it too? Can you do any auto-detection, so the list only presents what is available as valid options (and probably greying out the rest)? What happens if I set up 7.1 when I only have computer speakers attached?

* Why are playback, output devices, and input devices separate? Sure, they’re different technically, but I think the user wants to be able to control the overall volume of computer’s sound, the input volume, and application volume in once place. Can the UI be simplified to optimize for the 90% case? I think the fine-grained audio output UI (front left and right, back left and right, etc. can be either changed into volume + balance + fade, like a car radio, or have one overall volume with either details/advanced settings in a dialog or disclosure widget). I’d opt for a UI similar to what people already know, such as the car or home stereo setup (the volume + balance + fade approach).

I realize that your blog is not the appropriate place for official bugs on this sort of thing… and that bugzilla is, but since you’re talking about it, it is under development, and I’m referring to your screenshots, I decided to post here quickly.

Hopefully my feedback is useful.

Also, I should upgrade my laptop running an openSUSE 11 beta to the latest to see how it all works first-hand. (: