Idea #10246: Eliminate PC speaker-based system bell permanently.

It's the year 2008 and there's no longer a need to utilize the PC speaker for ANYTHING. As a KDE user I am constantly bothered by the system bell, particularly in Gnome apps like Pidgin and Firefox. If I were on Gnome I could easily go to a menu and shut off the system bell, yes. But even that shouldn't be necessary, and an inexperienced Linux user would have no idea how to do this.

The fact is that the PC Speaker is annoying to people who know what they're doing, and scary to those who don't. It also makes it hard to pitch Ubuntu to new users - who think the system bell noise means Ubuntu is doing something bad to their computers.

It's time to step into the new millennium, folks. The PC speaker is completely obsolete. Windows XP realized this in 2001 and used the PC Speaker ONLY in the absence of a properly working soundcard. Not only is this not a common problem (in Windows or Linux), but it would be easy to implement a similar compromise - using the bell only if no sound device is working.

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