http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10495
--- Comment #135 from Jeremy Visser jeremy.visser@gmail.com 2009-09-26 21:36:15 --- (In reply to comment #134)
Another reason, as has been discussed, is that pulse adds unreasonable latency to be used as a general purpose software mixer (as in one that is suitable for professional applications).
Dude, that's an argument against PulseAudio in general; not a valid reason for Wine not to support a native Pulse output (not that there aren't valid reasons). The fact is that most desktop distributions are shipping PulseAudio by default, and audio not working is a major paper cut for less technical users.
Furthermore, no one has proven that a pulse driver is actually NEEDED. The preferred solution is to modify, if possible, winealsa and/or wineoss drivers to work nicely with pulse. In this case, a pulse driver would *never* be needed.
That said, I am already very happy with Wine's ALSA output. It works beautifully with Pulse through the Alsa plugin these days. However, timing is an issue -- lip sync still doesn't work properly with my Bluetooth headset (which adds a 0.25sec latency), but lip sync is now perfect with native Linux apps (e.g. GStreamer apps).