Comment 71 for bug 579300

Ubuntu is depending on volunteers to do very, very much - very large parts of planning, development, bug fixing, testing, and documentation are made by volunteers, and would fall flat without them.

Also, this removal was being done at a time were it would be the least painful, in the beginning of a development cycle (so that there would be plenty of time of test and sort out the remaining issues), and right after a LTS release, so that people who need OSS still will have a functional Ubuntu version for three more years.

As for building your own kernel, we have some guides out there (under wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Dev ) and I'm waiting for another guide that is hopefully going to be even better. My hope is that it will be possible to auto-build custom kernels in PPAs, so that an initial setup is all you need - but I don't know for sure.

So I'm not an expert on what the kernel OSS emulation is doing bad; but I'm assuming that it won't work with bluetooth or firewire audio, and that it grabs exclusive access (i e, it won't mix with other sources, but whoever grabs it first wins). There is also the slim-and-trim argument - Ubuntu must fit on a CD, have fast startup times, less security holes, etc (although again, I don't know if the extra space and time is negligible).

So can I get a summary of what applications that actually need this emulation? Can we port them to ALSA, or at least fix them so they work with the userspace emulation (aoss / padsp)? Perhaps your favourite app can work better than ever in Ubuntu 11.04?