I kind of got the same feeling about transitioning to PipeWire just a few years after PulseAudio got things working, but other than that, IMO it's not like thin

I kind of got the same feeling about transitioning to PipeWire just a few years after PulseAudio got things working, but other than that, IMO it's not like things are being radically changed that often, let alone every release. The last time OSS was relevant on Linux was like 20 years ago. 20 years ago the latest Windows release was Windows 2000. Windows XP hadn't been released yet. OS X for the desktop had just been released. They don't look or act nearly the same now either. Is "what's wrong with {windows,mac} desktop" that they're not the same they were 20 years ago? It feels like yesterday, but 20 years really is quite a long time. If thinking back to the early 2000's isn't enough, just think of what happened with desktop computing in the 20 years that preceded that. I don't know much about ALSA but I've got the impression that it's significantly lower level than PA or PW. Maybe we could get by with just ALSA, but I'm honestly not sure it could be brought up to reasonable feature parity without either making it much more complex (and perhaps not suited for the kernel), or without accruing significant tech debt due to building new features on a foundation that isn't suited for them. Also, I haven't used KDE in a long time but Gnome 40 was the first time there was a major-ish overhaul to the desktop since the early Gnome 3 days. That was also around 10 years go. Everything in between was mostly iterative changes. Within those 10 years, Windows went through 8, 8.1 and 10.