After switching to 2008.0 desktop profile (from 2007.0) I have seen that "esd" USE flag is enabled by default. I think that esd is not a really needed app for desktop systems. Currently, it's only required for playing gnome-session sounds, but apps like nautilus already doesn't need it. Some months ago I decided to drop esd and arts from systems that I maintain because they tended to capture sound device preventing other users and apps get sound. Also, seems that esd is not being actively developed and some distributions have dropped it in favur of pulseaudio. For now, I prefer don't use any sound daemon, of course, this decission should be taken by Gnome Team as they knows much more about this than me Thanks a lot Reproducible: Always
"this decission" = decission to not set "esd" as default in desktop profile
Less and less packages require esound, and Lennart Pottering's libcanberra should also help. Right now, it's in the desktop profile because that's what is needed to get the full "Gnome" experience. None of us like esound, in fact I think we pretty much all hate it, considering all the time we have spent trying to make it build and run over the years. Trust me when I say we will be very happy to drop esd _completely_ once it has been successfully replaced.
reopening.
esd being obsolete by now, I guess we can close wontfix.
