For watching movies or listening to music, the Linux audio system is fine, but ALSA and PulseAudio introduce unacceptable latency for game devs. For example the

For watching movies or listening to music, the Linux audio system is fine, but ALSA and PulseAudio introduce unacceptable latency for game devs. For example the WINE developers are having major issues with PulseAudio's latency[1] There are actually 2 low level audio stacks that apps can use in Linux, OSS and ALSA. Only OSS offers great sound and low latency,[2] but the kernel developers have refused to add the free GPL'd OSSv4 updates into the kernel, so we are all stuck with OSSv3 legacy and ALSA's latency and poor design decisions. Using the PA layer only makes the latency situation worse and added another layer for things to go wrong. [1]http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyODM http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyO... [2]http://insanecoding.blogspot.hk/2009/06/state-of-sound-in-linux-not-so-sorry.html http://insanecoding.blogspot.hk/2009/06/state-of-sound-in-li...