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/