I recently found myself working on something audio related on Linux (trying to use Espeak-NG with an alternate audio device) and was running some copy & pasted

I recently found myself working on something audio related on Linux (trying to use Espeak-NG with an alternate audio device) and was running some copy & pasted commands from a Github issue or Stackexchange question or something, and realized that I know bugger-all about Audio on Linux. I mean, I've heard all the jargon over the years... ALSA, OSS, PipeWire, PulseAudio, JACK, etc. But I really have almost no concept of how all of this stuff works and how it all ties together, and what all of these commands are really telling me, etc. So I started googling around trying to find a good resource that explains it all. The site linked above looks like a good starting point, as does this: https://wiki.linuxaudio.org/wiki/start https://wiki.linuxaudio.org/wiki/start If anybody else has better suggestions, by all means, please share. And if anybody else is wondering, "espeak-ng -d <device>" apparently expects as its argument a number drawn from the list returned by this command: > pactl list short sources Why is it so? Your guess is as good as mine. EDIT: and that's apparently only true if you have pulseaudio installed. If you aren't running PA, I'm not sure how you determine how to tell espeak-ng to use a device other than the default. Probably some alsa command or something?