On Thu, 2 Aug 2018 10:15:22 +0200
Stefan Krusche <linux@...> wrote:

> Am Donnerstag 02 August 2018 schrieb William Morder:
> > I searched the forums, tried various solutions, and eventually just purged
> > everything possible that I could find connected to pulse. (I always
> > preferred ALSA, anyway.) Some Trinity packages seem to depend on pulse or
> > pulse libraries, though, so I wonder if it's possible to get rid of
> > everything pulse without breaking my system.
> >
> > On a side note, I have similar problems with VLC. I cannot actually *use*
> > it, as it crashes every time. I have made do with smplayer, which is okay,
> > I guess, but I still miss the old VLC. When I try to uninstall or purge
> > VLC, however, I find that it would also uninstall practically all my KDE
> > and TDE packages.
> 
> I don't think that TDE depends on pulse, at least not the base libraries. I have 
> not *all* TDE packages installed, but quite a copious install and there is no 
> pulse (on Devuan ascii).

KDE3 predated pulseaudio, so I find it unlikely that any Trinity package has
a hard dependency on it.  None of the packages I have installed even have
it as an optional dependency, so nothing in tdebase uses it.

In general, if you're using the simple setup of a single set of wired speakers
or headphones, and are content with a single master volume control, you
don't need pulseaudio, whatever your distro's package manager may claim 
(if you need media support in Firefox, try installing apulse instead).  Other
than that, well, I've encountered one cheap game from Humble Bundle
that wouldn't play nice with my ALSA-only setup.

E. Liddell