Rid thyself of that pesky PulseAudio daemon in Arch / Manjaro Linux

I have a very lightweight system -- a laptop from 2008 -- that usually works quite well until PulseAudio gets in the way of things.

Here are some tricks to disable PulseAudio:

1. Edit /etc/pulse/client.conf and add the line:
   

   autospawn = no

2. If you want to go "the whole nine yards" and uninstall PulseAudio entirely, you can build a Gnome package that does not depend on PulseAudio:
   

   yaourt -S gnome-settings-daemon-nopulse

3. Next, you can entirely remove packages that depend on PulseAudio:
   

   pacman -R pulseaudio pulseaudio-alsa lib32-libcanberra-pulse lib32-libpulse manjaro-pulse xfce4-volumed-pulse skype

   Note that Skype 4.3 requires PulseAudio. Therefore, you have little choice but to remove it.