You've already been told about ALSA (which Pulse uses and organizes, for its the low-level audio subsystem the kernel offers) and Jack, which specializes in low

You've already been told about ALSA (which Pulse uses and organizes, for its the low-level audio subsystem the kernel offers) and Jack, which specializes in low-latency audio. There's also sndio ported from OpenBSD. But the one you might want to consider instead is called PipeWire. It implements the ALSA, Pulse and Jack APIs with a single implementation and it's pretty much the future of audio (and video casting) on Linux. If you're using Wayland, you're already using PipeWire, but likely not for audio. On Fedora you can follow the instructions here https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DefaultPipeWire https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DefaultPipeWire which basically boil down as "uninstall pulse and install these packages" and you'll be using PipeWire for your audio. I had tried several times to switch to it and it was not ready, but about a week ago I've been able to make the move with no loss in functionality and even got a fix to an old bug that affected my sound card, so at least with version 0.3.22 I can recommend giving it a go. Switching back to Pulse if bugs arise is trivial anyway.