[gf000]

Well, for ALSA and pulseaudio, the latter more or less just surfaced the tons of bugs in the underlying, at the time very shitty audio drivers. Remember, only pulseaudio is a sound server, so ALSA wasn't even exercising many of the more "advanced" features, and drivers were only supporting the most basic stuff.

[eqvinox]

That's at odds with the fact that pulseaudio is incapable of exposing the audio reference clocks from sound hardware, which is a fundamental aspect of digital audio engineering. Its design doesn't even acknowledge the existence of an audio clock.

That's fine for basic audio but completely excludes any higher demand application, including high quality A/V sync. Best you can do is work around and best effort guess.

[gf000]

My point wasn't that pulseaudio is flawless, it's just that it has a much worse name than it deserves.

[Izkata]

Considering pipewire was a drop-in replacement for pulseaudio with (almost*) full compatibility and none of the stability issues (you can even use the pulseaudio commands to control it), the problem was definitely in the pulseaudio code.

* I do remember reading there was one feature they intentionally dropped because it was extremely rarely useful and could be handled in a different way, but don't remember what it was.

[gf000]

So one audio server managed to provide a shim for another audio server, great.

But it absolutely doesn't follow from that that pulseaudio was somehow bad. There was more than a decade where audio drivers were slowly getting bug fixes to get to a state where they are working okay for the most part. Pipewire would have experienced many of the same issues as pulseaudio, and we would similarly attribute those errors incorrectly to the audio server.

[Izkata]

My laptop would regularly freeze and need a hard reboot, and I never could figure out why. One day for a completely unrelated reason I decided to try switching from pulseaudio to pipewire, with no other changes (including no other upgrades; I'm lazy and like stability), and months later I realized it hadn't frozen at all. Still hasn't, years later. The problem was definitely pulseaudio making the whole system unstable, not just causing audio issues.