Why pavucontrol is not installed by default?

[Jon Masters]

On Wed, 2009-12-09 at 02:44 -0500, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 2:05 PM, Jon Masters wrote:
> >
> > The new gnome-volume-control is so cut-down it's not useful to me. In
> > the quest to be more Mac-like in removing mixer controls (and not even
> > having any obvious "advanced" mode), I now have a choice of no audio or
> > having full volume LFE output *and* whatever mixer level I have set for
> > the master output. alsamixer works fine, but then I can't use the volume
> > sliders on my desktop and it gets rather awkward.

> Sadly, they consider this bug as an enhancement. I have had friends
> who had the same hardware with me but they were using another OS. I
> remember them being jealous because I had so much more control over
> same sound card. It made me proud at the time. I fear that this
> disease of oversimplifying will make us forget why we are using Linux.

All paranoia and ranting aside, there is some truth to this. There is a
definite trend in the Linux community to want to cater to the lowest
common denominator by being more Mac/Windows-esque. I put up with it
because I can usually ignore it (I refuse on principal to use a GUI to
copy a file, for example, but that's just me being weird), but I don't
see the harm in hiding the advanced stuff under a checkbox - the
advanced mixer stuff is still there underneath after all.

Jon.