[RedShift1]

Consider me in the same camp. When I set up audio on my linux pc back in the day, the only thing I had to do was enable the alsa daemon to restore volume levels at boot and everything just worked. Then later Pulsaudio was kinda forced on me and I didn't (and still don't) understand why it was needed, it was something about allow multiple applications outputting audio at the same time but that worked just fine with alsa? Plus it didn't work well: under load audio would stutter which was extremely annoying as I listened to music quite frequently while working on my computer, a problem I did not have with alsa. So there I was with a shiny AMD Athlon 64 3500+ that couldn't even play mp3's straight.