There has been a problem with PulseAudio causing a long delay at login (see: http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/install-boot-login/456906-long-delay-after-desktop-appears.html) that seems to have appeared with 11.4 and still exists in 12.2. From that thread:
My question is if PulseAudio causes such problems, why are those packages installed at all? What is the side effect of removing them?
On 2012-10-17 21:36, quantamm wrote:
> My question is if PulseAudio causes such problems, why are those
> packages installed at all?
Because it doesn’t cause any problem to me. 
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
If everyone having this problem disabled PA instead of reporting problem and helping to fix it, I am not surprised. As you may guess, not everyone has this issue.
I’ve had this issue only on the machines that run the KDE desktop.
Always have to disable pulse and fallback to alsa to get a quick desktop startup. Gnome, XFCE etc work fine. Even though Gnome/XFCE has pulse as well, I haven’t seen any delays there so can leave it enabled.
Okay, fair enough. 
But this happens on all of my KDE4 systems - three desktops, two laptops. Two of them have “virgin” installations of 12.2 (i.e., no user files, custom configuration, etc that might be the cause). And from the other replies, it seems like this may usually be an issue when KDE4 is installed. I will report it as a bug sometime over the weekend when I have the time to write it up nice and neat.
However, what is the side effect of removing PA? I’m not familiar at all with Linux’s sound subsystem, I’m just grateful when it works.
I haven’t experienced any. I’ve heard some programs require pulse (maybe in the Gnome installation?). I don’t know what those are, but I haven’t had anything crash on me because of sound.
Usually, I just remove all pulse programs, especially “pulseaudio”.
zypper rm pulse
Then I go into YaST > Sound and delete the sound configuration in there and set up a new one with Pulse Disabled. This causes the sound to fallback to ALSA.
Anyone know of any articles explaining how to fall back to ALSA in openSUSE?
I don’t have openSUSE here with me ATM so can’t offer details.
On my KDE installations, I now remove all pulse related packages during installation and install ALSA and setup the sound. You can do this easily when installing if you “uncheck” Automatic Configuration.
If you forget to uncheck ‘Automatic Configuration’, at the end when you get the summary on all that’s happening, you can go into Packages and remove them there, then go into Sound and reconfigure it to use alsa only.
On 2012-10-19 20:46, quantamm wrote:
>
> robin_listas;2496773 Wrote:
>> On 2012-10-17 21:36, quantamm wrote:
>> Because it doesn’t cause any problem to me.
>>
>
> Okay, fair enough. 
But this happens on all of my KDE4 systems -
> three desktops, two laptops. Two of them have “virgin” installations of
> 12.2 (i.e., no user files, custom configuration, etc that might be the
> cause). And from the other replies, it seems like this may usually be an
> issue when KDE4 is installed. I will report it as a bug sometime over
> the weekend when I have the time to write it up nice and neat.
I don’t know why it is typical to have problems with pulse sound and
kde. I know that it plays nicer with gtk desktops like gnome or xfce. As
pulse is the default in openSUSE, the openSUSE kde devs should have
worked out the klinks by now, it has been this way for years.
A typical solution is to disable pulse in yast sound configuration.
On the other hand, I have problems with some applications that do not
recognize pulse, like voip apps.
> However, what is the side effect of removing PA? I’m not familiar at
> all with Linux’s sound subsystem, I’m just grateful when it works.
I don’t know. You don’t get its features. When it works, you can have
many applications accessing the sound system simultaneously. Prior to
pulse, if I played a flash video in Firefox, and later (without closing
the tab in FF) I wanted to play an mp3 from my disk, it would fail. Now
for me this problem is for me a long past issue.
I can not understand why KDE doesn’t work nicely with it.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
On 2012-10-20 01:26, saultdon wrote:
> Then I go into YaST > Sound and delete the sound configuration in there
> and set up a new one with Pulse Disabled. This causes the sound to
> fallback to ALSA.
Disabling pulse in yast should be enough.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)