It was. Before pulseaudio became the de-facto standard lots of people wouldn't even install an additional layer and use plain old alsa. Which meant you couldn't

It was. Before pulseaudio became the de-facto standard lots of people wouldn't even install an additional layer and use plain old alsa. Which meant you couldn't change the volumes of applications individually. You could have used artsd, esd, or something else, but the problem was that there shouldn't be 3 bad solutions to choose from. There should be one good solution. I remember installing redhat 9 and having to configure my sound card driver manually for an old creative soundblaster about 10 years ago. Further, back in those days it was not at all obvious how to get Linux to even play an MP3 (I know, this is an audio encoding and not related to the audio subsystem, but my point is: it was hard. These days you just install a mainstream distro and mp3 codec is there.) Linux has come a tremendous way in the last 10 years. Don't you remember the nightmares? Editing Xorg.conf, and such? But wait, I remember when it was still called XF86Config. /me shudders Today anyone can pop in an ubuntu dvd and be rolling in seconds with all hardware working (for a lot of systems*). Not long ago we had to research our hardware and hunt down solutions just to get a working machine.