Based on this 2020 Arch Linux thread, that is what apulse solves:

It's good to know that, for people who don't need their browser accessing the microphone, the rest should work without needing the apulse hack.

For clarity, when you say "works just fine", you mean you have successfully streamed audio and video though the browser, yes?

Audio and video playback works. I haven't tried using a microphone yet.

Edit: No, my microphone doesn't work. Not a big deal for me, but I could see than being a deal breaker for many.

Firefox works just fine with pure alsa, no apulse required. If anyone is having issues with firefox and alsa, make sure you purge pulseaudio. I assume if you only remove, rather than purge, then some configuration files get left behind that mess with firefox.

For clarity, when you say "works just fine", you mean you have successfully streamed audio and video though the browser, yes?

First off, I removed pulseaudio with the following:

apt purge pulseaudio
apt --purge autoremove

Firefox works just fine with pure alsa, no apulse required. If anyone is having issues with firefox and alsa, make sure you purge pulseaudio. I assume if you only remove, rather than purge, then some configuration files get left behind that mess with firefox.

Second, I encountered the issue in this thread:
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=6243
For now booting into 6.1.0-10 is working just fine. I have no idea how to configure Grub to boot a different kernel by default. Lilo was so much simpler... I suppose I could remove 6.1.0-15 and block it from installing.

Third, the lock screen behaves very strangely when I close the lid. The previous contents of the screen are visible, but I cannot interact with them. If I enter my password the screen unlocks successfully. It does this with both the default configuration, and when I alter /usr/bin/xflock4 to use slimlock instead of xscreensaver. Selecting Lock Screen from the menu behaves as expected.

Disabling xscreensaver entirely seems to occasionally leave the system in an unrecoverable state, where I just have a blank screen, and am unable to switch to a TTY. I haven't figured out which conditions produce this result yet. I intend to put void back on this laptop, so I'm not going to bother to fix it.

(Using /usr/local/share/applications/firefox-esr.desktop should work, but I can't verify right now; using ~/.local/share/applications/firefox-esr.desktop will work, but is of course per-user.)

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Although I guess you might also need to update /etc/alternatives/x-www-browser too, so maybe working directly with /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefox-esr is actually less work.

Just to note, I run daedalus with pure ALSA and firefox-esr but I have to run it under apulse for working audio. I do this by moving the binary /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefox-esr to the filename firefox-esr.orig and then set it as a link to my start script (named firefox-esr.apulse). Here's that script:

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/apulse /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefox-esr.orig "$@"

The only "problem" with it is that firefox-esr updates replaces the link with its new binary, so I need to repeat moving it and restoring the link after update.

I am using grub with luks and LVM, works fine for me for many years by now.

I'm currently upgrading a number of systems to Daedalus, initially installed as Ascii and then upgraded to Beowulf, and thought I might as well share my observations. This isn't a request for support, I'm just rambling, so I figured Off Topic would be a reasonable spot to post this.

So far I've completed the upgrade process on my home server, and I've encountered a few quirks:
  1. Fdisk was autoremoved
  2. The Lynx web browser was pulled in as a recommended package by CUPS
  3. The Lilo package is no longer in the repos starting with Chimaera, much to my chagrin

I'm left scratching my head here, trying to imagine why the Debian maintainers decided that fdisk was unimportant enough that it could be removed, and yet a web browser was pulled in on a headless system. This seems absurd to me.

I can understand why Lilo was removed. Through my experimentation with Void Linux, I've discovered that Lilo fails to build with device mapper support. It seems something changed in a recent version of libdevmapper. Lilo works fine on Void with a basic installation without LVM or LUKS. The good news is, at least on my server, the Lilo package from Beowulf continues to function on Daedalus, so for now I've just left it alone.

Overall the upgrade went smoother than I expected. Impressive, considering this install has been upgraded across 4 major versions now.

My desktop is next, and I foresee a few potential stumbling blocks:
  1. My desktop uses LUKS and LVM, so I have no idea how Lilo will behave
  2. I'm seeing a number of threads on the forum here claiming that Firefox-ESR isn't functioning correctly with ALSA-only audio setups
  3. The new bright blue theme looks incredibly harsh on the eyes

I'm not sure why Firefox wouldn't work with ALSA. Looking at the src package, it's being built with the ALSA option.

Changing the theme in XFCE is easy enough, and it looks like the Cinnabar package is still available. I've never changed the theme in SLIM, so I have no idea how difficult it is.

As a little side note, I'm glad I checked. I was automatically logged out while typing this, and would have lost the post otherwise. Not so great... A reminder to type out long posts in a text file first.