[dTal]

Vast amount of revisionism in this thread.

Lots of comments saying ALSA doesn't do mixing. This is false. ALSA has always supported mixing through dmix, and it's enabled by default.

Lots of comments saying ALSA doesn't do hotplugging. This is also false - hotplugging works like any other hardware on Linux. Plug it in and it shows up. To configure that card as the default requires changing a configuration file. You can make this happen automatically with udev.

Lots of comments saying ALSA doesn't work with bluetooth headsets. Google "bluez-alsa" folks. FFS.

Now, that's not to say that all of this worked seamlessly. Configuring everything through /etc/asound.rc or .asoundrc was a pain, in large part because there were no GUI tools to do so. And because applications read .asoundrc on startup, there was no way of switching a playing stream to a different card, live. THAT is the use case that a userspace daemon solves.

The upsetting thing is we already had two userspace daemons, aRts and ESD [KDE and GNOME respectively], that more or less worked fine. Instead we suffered with years of broken audio.