I usually had sound cards with hardware mixing, but what was wrong with esd? It did software mixing and seemed to work. (And didn't require you to run the rest of enlightenment, despite the name)
Never mind that ESD and like is a leftover from the OSS days. Alsa has its own sofware mixer, dmix, that these days can be transparently inserted when the underlying hardware do not offer hardware mixing.
I wonder of Linux's biggest problem these days is the amount of "herd knowledge" that is floating around that is obsolete to say the least, yet is being used to justify some dev's latest weekend glory project.
> Never mind that ESD and like is a leftover from the OSS days.
I never had many problems with OSS either. :) I'm bringing up esd because I was misrembering that when pulseaudio came on the scene, it seemed to be already existing, not screwing up too badly, and addressing the commonly held up use case of software mixing.
After reading notalaser's fine summary [1], I'm realizing I've lumped 'ALSA broke everything that I already had working (but did eventually work, and support newer hardware)' and 'PulseAudio broke everything that I already had working' together in time in my mind, when really things were many years apart. It seems that by the time PulseAudio came out / was widely pushed, ALSA had already subsumed esd (unless you were using the network audio features), so the most often reported 'great thing' doesn't sound like something people wouldn't have had.
