For many years, the API incompatibility between OSS and ALSA made getting sound working at all was often a nightmarish task. There were a number of sound server

For many years, the API incompatibility between OSS and ALSA made getting sound working at all was often a nightmarish task. There were a number of sound servers that tried to alleviate the problem, but they all used incompatible APIs and couldn't be used in parallel. It was, and is, awful. It's only very, very recently that PulseAudio has gotten to the point where it works most of the time, and it still has major unresolved problems. And there are still programs that use the OSS and ALSA APIs directly. While it does work fairly well, there are still incompatibility issues with programs that use Pulse. It's ludicrous to suggest that there are no problems.