Pulseaudio used to be kind of troublesome back in the day but nowadays it's been much much better. It works out of the box on all the distros I've tried (Arch,

Pulseaudio used to be kind of troublesome back in the day but nowadays it's been much much better. It works out of the box on all the distros I've tried (Arch, Manjaro, Debian and Ubuntu). When I was running Debian (this was 2 years ago, by the way) I used to need to kill Pulseaudio before launching Jack because the two systems used to conflict and when Jack was running a lot of Pulseaudio applications wouldn't work (so, for example, if you had Jack running you couldn't watch a movie with audio through pulse). Nowadays I use Manjaro as desktop distro and I can just launch qjackctl (or resume a ladish session) without needing to manually stop pulse myself, it's all done automatically and it's really seamless. I use jack only when I'm doing sound production/recording, for everything else Pulseaudio is great.