[VorpalWay]

Could be. I don't remember Arch being on my radar at that point though. But it wasn't long after I switched from Gentoo to Arch (and then Debian for a decade due to lack of stability before going back to Arch 7 years ago or so).

A few years before the Xorg thing there was also the 2.4 to 2.6 kernel switchover. I think I maybe was using Slackware at that point, and I remember building my own kernel to try out the new shiny thing. You also had to update some userspace packages if I remember correctly: things like modprobe/insmod at the very least.

[ofalkaed]

2.6 was also the switch from OSS to Alsa, which caused some fun, Alsa really was not ready for prime time.

[VorpalWay]

Oh yeah, you just unlocked a forgotten memory. I was actually lucky there, I had a SoundBlaster Live 5.1 which worked just fine on ALSA (hardware mixing even worked out of the box). But I remember lots of other people complaining on IRC about it.

[doubled112]

And once ALSA was working pretty well for me, PulseAudio came too soon.