Oh, I definitely wasn't singing their praises even if ALSA was a step up from OSS, PulseAudio was just a new low for me in sound systems. My biggest frustratio

Oh, I definitely wasn't singing their praises even if ALSA was a step up from OSS, PulseAudio was just a new low for me in sound systems. My biggest frustration with it was the tendency it's always had on my systems to simply stop producing sound with no obvious cause and when it was working block anything that didn't use it from producing sound. Sometimes a random process had either accidentally muted everything or triggered a bug that did so, other times audio would get sent off to some completely useless sink, occasionally there were no noticeable causes and you just had to kill and restart the daemon (if you were lucky). On top of that a lot of choices were made that tended to bind it to one console, so switching to another would cut out all sound. I guess my core complaint is that ALSA could be a pain to get working properly on a new system, but once it was working it didn't usually spontaneously break on me. PulseAudio was only slightly more likely to work out of the box, but was much more likely to break without my making any changes. I guess it's partially a sysadmin mindset, but I usually come down on the side of preferring up-front pain to long term unreliability. Perhaps I didn't use as wide a set of audio programs as you did, I didn't tend to run as many of them at once, or my hardware just had better drivers. For streaming sound (I didn't care about video) I usually stuck to network servers that could shove audio down a Shoutcast or http stream and listening with something like Amarok or MPD, I'm sure PA was nicer if you were trying to relay what your HTPC was playing back. [ETA: I use linux consoles very heavily when I'm coding on a linux machine, I know this isn't exactly the most common behavior among more recent unix users.]