[SFjulie1]

It has a common point with systemd : the lead is Lennart Poettering.

Sound on linux is a mess. And pulse audio is vastly blamed for it. Complex circonvoluted architecture that overpromised and under delivered..

The guy loves to brag about how he is the messiah of a problem and will fixt it, make galaxy like software that are unstable and leave a mess after his doing saying my job is done, let's work on another project where my genius is needed.

But, after utterly messing up once, notably at the (lack of) design level, he has been entrusted to no overpromise again and make the ultimate revolution for the init process. A lot of coders did not believe in his repentance for the mess in pulse audio : he may be as arrogant as linus torvalds he is as smart and a good coder as rasmus lerdorf.

The PID1 on linux is now known as a solar system of processes with nice chaotic trajectories and astronomers are seriously planning to use systemd alone as a nth body interaction simulator.. unexpected .

[smt88]

I switched from desktop Linux to Windows entirely because of Lennart Poettering. Audio was a complete disaster, as you mentioned. (This was only a few months ago.)

[nine_k]

What was so wrong with Linux audio, if you don't mind?

I experience about zero problems. Maybe it's because I don't run pulseaudio.

[smt88]

PulseAudio seems to get by far the most development and support. I tried ALSA and couldn't get any sound at all, and it didn't seem to be very well integrated into my shell. I did get ALSA to work on my laptop, but there were still lots of tradeoffs.

[digi_owl]

Shell, as in Gnome-Shell? No surprises there if so.

That said, at its core Pulseaudio depends on ALSA for the hardware handling.

Frankly the only useful thing Pulseaudio does it handle inputs and outputs when dealing with multiple sound devices. But then so does JACK.

Everything else, from volume control (hello hearing damage with default settings) to bit rate mangling, is massively superfluous.