Pulseaudio has been painless for like a decade and a half. Yes, it has a rough start and was probably made default in many distros before it ought to, but it's fine.
Pulse audio is ok until you plug or unplug things like earpieces and bluetooth speakers and then you want to do a videocall and random devices are the active ones.
And then you find no obvious way to be able to record both input and output...
Lol because that never happens on any other OS. Plug my Mac into my dock, uses my DAC. Great. Unplug. Connect Bluetooth headphones. So far so good. Plug back into dock. Now it's... the built in audio? Huh?
I'm honestly surprised how often in Linux PA with WirePlumber just does the right thing most times, IME.
This is my Monday morning dance of Bluetooth. 99% of the time I'll join a call and everything is connected, line levels are set and yet... No audio. I know people complain about Pulse but MacOS is just as bad and, seemingly, getting worse.
Perhaps the parent poster user AirPods. Those in contrast would seamlessly switch between your iPhone and MacBook . Apple more or less by planned design nowadays work seamlessly with their own products and their support for other devices is patchy .
Last I tried that (because everyone claimed it was magically better at everything) sound just randomly broke (I had no idea why, debugging pipewire is a nightmare), and since I switched back to pulseaudio everything just works again (and seems to use less CPU, but that could be selective memory).
Maybe I'm just old and grumpy, but we spent decades hammering out all the incorrect (for pulseaudio) assumptions in every layer of the stack and papered over impedance mismatches, and then people decide to rewrite from scratch again (though I'll admit I was a vocal pro-dmix anti-pulseaudio hater for a long time).
Good thing that Debian pushed that thing into "non-core compatibility tools" status. It and NVidia drivers were always the things that made upgrading risky.
Relatedly, systemd stopped breaking a while ago. Either distros stopped keeping it up-to-date or people can learn.
Anything with the Red Hat stink, these days. Which, yeah, a lot of that’s Poettering.
If they haven’t been executing a plan to make it extremely painful to maintain a distro that differs significantly from whatever Red Hat’s preferences and ways of operating are (so, making it harder to justify anything but “screw it, we’ll just use red hat, everyone else is just the same thing but with less ability to steer the direction of the OS”), damn the effects on UX, the traditional modular nature of Linux systems, and general open source ecosystem health… well, they’ve sure done a great job of it, so it’d be pretty crazy if that isn’t what they’ve been doing.
Latest venture of the ilk behind all that : device attestation for Linux (Amutable). Yes, they clearly have an agenda and are being quite successful at pushing it.
For some reason they just can't help themselves from "improving" the themes that people are already using instead of creating new ones that people can choose if they want extra white space or whatever is hip now.
an update last year broke some laptop microphone settings that in 30 years of using linux I had had no reason to even know existed. took me literally a couple of weeks to figure out what was going on and fix it. it was admittedly the first time in many years that it broke anything, but when it did it did so in style.