http://design.canonical.com/2010/04/notification-area/
That link... says it all. Oh and a word of warning, the "Submit comment" button way down there, might not work, might try to save a php file.
Bye-bye Alsa,
Bye-bye Pidgin,
You will be heavily missed, as Alsa will not conform to the sound indicator, and Pidgin won't conform to the message indicator. The latter, with pidgin, is due to how it works in Windows.
Uh. What does ALSA have to do with the notification area? It's a set of kernel-level drivers and a daemon. Unless you're talking about ubuntu/gnome's ALSA volume control applet.
Well, I don't generally run ubuntu anyway, but I see they are continuing their trend of breaking compatibility.
Because the Sound Notification Icon in 10.04 (Yes, they removed the systray sound icon and replaced it with a notifier applet instead) still only works with pulse if I recall, which is not alsa.
I know the systray icon never would work if I chose to remove all traces of pulseaudio (it would either be always muted, or changing the volume wouldn't do anything.) I'm pretty sure that GNOME Alsa Volume Control applet doesn't have a volume flyout like the one this one has, as I've used the GNOME ALSA Applet before. I like the flyout....
I think that pulse runs on top of ALSA, but I could be wrong, as I have never used it.
Quote from: "Canonical on safety"Nuke the entire site from orbit â€" it’s the only way to be sure
I like this way of thinking. -w-
I still don't 100% understand why they introduced pulseaudio to begin with, but it is such a pain in the ass... and it looks like it's gotten worse.
This isn't too bad, but it just seems so dumb.