Thanks, that's a definite win for pulseaudio and I hadn't really considered the developer side of it at all (I'm primarily backend/network/db). I certainly don

Thanks, that's a definite win for pulseaudio and I hadn't really considered the developer side of it at all (I'm primarily backend/network/db). I certainly don't think pulseaudio is an inherently bad architecture, but I do feel it's matured too slowly in terms of stability. On the flip side as you it's more user-friendly than Network Audio Server (which has fewer features) and and as you point out supports more of the "I've got an hdmi output playing music through my tv, but a bluetooth headset for voip" use cases that a decent-sized class of users run into. It also occurs to me for the first time that the rise of pulseaudio was not that many years after laptops largely switched to integrated codec chips instead of discrete sound and I had all sorts of problems with those above and beyond the "Damn it, give me hardware volume controls" frustrations. It could have inherited some of the problems around quirky/flaky hardware that I remember ALSA facing in that period. At this point I just want something that can reliably play music or take audio input and for whatever reason pulseaudio isn't it for me. Hopefully that'll change before most distros switch to whatever the new hotness in sound setups is...