[shmerl]

Developers should be quite right then ditching that middleware company and finding something professional instead, that works on Linux.

Most common closed gaming middleware works on Linux today (Wwise, Umbra3D and so on). And that's besides open source options of course. So the above is very unprofessional view.

[Jasper_]

Wwise only works on ALSA, it doesn't work on OSS or JACK or ESD or whatever some user's preferred sound daemon is. Or at least didn't when we had users complain about it. Fragmentation is a serious issue, and Linux users demand that developers implement one solution because they believe it to be technically superior.

[NullPrefix]

You can use ALSA apps on pulseaudio systems. Pulseaudio and ALSA covers really big percentage of Linux installs.

[shmerl]

Doesn't it work with PulseAudio? Using raw ALSA doesn't sound common. And there are plugins for such cases.

Linux as a whole is moving towards Pipewire anyway: https://pipewire.org

That will take time still.

[azinman2]

Now yet ANOTHER way to do audio on Linux? Oi vey...

https://www.xkcd.com/927/

[shmerl]

It's a good evolution over Pulse and Jack. Partially driven by Wayland security model too. So I see no problem in doing the right thing here.

And I don't like that xkcd in general because it's missing the point. Its basic idea boils down to "don't improve anything because it's another new thing" which is outright wrong. Not every design can be improved incrementally.

[tracker1]

It's still possible for a new interface to provide a compatibility or translation API for prior software.

[shmerl]

Sure, and it's already done for Pulse / ALSA for example. Pipewire can do the same if it's possible.

[bitwize]

Pipewire can also route video, silencing once and for all the "muh network transparency" whiners who are dragging their feet on switching to Wayland.