[diltonm]

Agreed, the designers of X made some truly brilliant decisions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-Client_Communication_Conv...

Edit: I don't have a dog in the hunt on systemd but if it really is tight coupling then history might prove it was a bad decision. There was a lot of let's say strong opinions against Pulse Audio on Linux but I find (once we got through the growing pains) that it's a blessing. It's far superior to Windows 7's basic audio management in my opinion. I've no idea about Windows 8.

[nitrogen]

Everything PulseAudio does should have been implemented as part of ALSA though, not as another layer that only exposes a fraction of the libalsa functionality.

[Shish2k]

Wouldn't that imply putting a network-accessible server in the kernel? That seems a fair bit more risky than non-root userspace...

[nitrogen]

No, alsa actually does its most interesting stuff in userland.