On Wed, 2016-02-17 at 10:17 -0600, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
Hi,
A few months ago we discussed my proposal to disable PulseAudio flat
volumes, as it results in applications setting system volume to 100%,
which at best is loud and annoying, and at worst is bad for your ears
if you're using headphones; I've had to train myself to avoid this
issue by adjusting my headphones' volume with a hardware slider and
always leaving the OS volume at 100%, which is a terrible user
experience.
When last discussed, the working group agreed to ask the PulseAudio
developers about the issue, without requiring any changes. Since
then,
the developers agreed on a solution to fix this problem without
disabling flat volumes, but the solution has not been implemented
yet.
I'm concerned it will not be implemented in time for F24. Due to the
severity of the issue, I propose we require flat volumes to be
temporarily disabled in Fedora 24 and future Fedora releases until
the
issue has been fixed.
We were planning to vote on this at the working group meeting today,
but ran out of time, so working group members should vote here. I am
obviously +1.
This issue is tracked here:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1265267
That sort of whiplash (disabling something 'temporarily' only to bring
it back next release) is generally frustrating to all sides. The flat
volume haters will rejoice when we turn it off now and upset when we
bring it back later. The flat volume proponents will have the opposite
reaction. And everybody else will just shake their head and think "they
have no idea what they're doing".
Since we've been living with flat volume's warts for so long, I would
suggest to wait for the PA fixes.