I wholeheartedly agree, but the frustrations are quite understandable. If you want to do something somewhat advanced and you have to care about Jack, Alsa, and

I wholeheartedly agree, but the frustrations are quite understandable. If you want to do something somewhat advanced and you have to care about Jack, Alsa, and then the Pulse or Pipewire layers, it's quite overwhelming (why would you have to know the Linux audio history to work with it). PulseAudio was quite buggy when it was considered ready for general public by Ubuntu. I kept using some scripts to do what it could theoretically do for 2/3 years, and then it didn't have any quirks anymore. Now that it is replaced by the pipewire stack, audio bugs are back. For instance, on a laptop if system audio is set to 'output' instead of duplex, switching between speakers and headphones does not work, and volume change would sometimes get stuck. And sometimes it duplicates the streams on another system, which can be solved by killing the daemon. Even with this less stable state, I agree that this is nothing compared to how bad the situation is in Mac or Windows world. In the professional environments I've been in, basically all people have given up on the system properly switching their device parameters correctly. So calls often need a few minutes to reconfigure audio. Same with external screen switching.