Long ago, I had SoundBlaster Live! soundcard which was perfectly capable of mixing audio on hardware under ALSA, which in my mind meant that all of the userland sound daemon nonsense could go straight to hell for all I cared. Earlier, EsounD never worked right and no app supported it directly and the wrapper utility was a hassle when it even worked. Then came PulseAudio. I could get buuutttery smooth audio on direct ALSA or laggy barely working audio on Pulse. Absolute hog.
Sure, nowadays the situation is better. But back in the day, for me, the answer to “why isn’t the sound working?” was usually “you tried to use anything but direct ALSA”.
Funny. My experience was the exact opposite. Maybe it was bad defaults which I never managed to fix, but I could never get two apps to use sound at the same time, which meant until Pulse became the standard and fixed everything, it was always constant battles between aRts, ESD, and apps that used neither.
I have not made the switch to Linux in the days where I still had a dedicated sound card. But I had extremely similar circumstances without a dedicated sound card. So I definitely believe you
Long ago, I had SoundBlaster Live! soundcard which was perfectly capable of mixing audio on hardware under ALSA, which in my mind meant that all of the userland sound daemon nonsense could go straight to hell for all I cared. Earlier, EsounD never worked right and no app supported it directly and the wrapper utility was a hassle when it even worked. Then came PulseAudio. I could get buuutttery smooth audio on direct ALSA or laggy barely working audio on Pulse. Absolute hog.
Sure, nowadays the situation is better. But back in the day, for me, the answer to “why isn’t the sound working?” was usually “you tried to use anything but direct ALSA”.
Funny. My experience was the exact opposite. Maybe it was bad defaults which I never managed to fix, but I could never get two apps to use sound at the same time, which meant until Pulse became the standard and fixed everything, it was always constant battles between aRts, ESD, and apps that used neither.
I have not made the switch to Linux in the days where I still had a dedicated sound card. But I had extremely similar circumstances without a dedicated sound card. So I definitely believe you