My hardware is ostensibly supported, but I often have to killall pulseaudio or restart the machine to get audio playing on Flash in Chrome. Part of my point, t

My hardware is ostensibly supported, but I often have to killall pulseaudio or restart the machine to get audio playing on Flash in Chrome. Part of my point, though, is it's not a question of the competence of free software developers. It's a question of the capacity of free software developers in the long-standing market / legal ecosystem to deliver a reliable solution at all. The roadblock may be entirely structural and completely unfair; doesn't matter. As the end-user (speaking with the Queen's "end-user"), we don't care why it doesn't work; we care that if we buy this computer / OS it works, and if we install that OS on that computer it doesn't. So of course we buy this computer / OS; we have work to do, and "Make the ecosystem fair for hackers to implement a working and reliable pulseaudio" isn't that work. Knuth, when faced with a world where he didn't have a typesetting solution to print his book, wrote TeX. Most people just put up with the crappy existing solution, because their goal is to write a book.