> Curious about this, since as far as audio goes, as long as there's PulseAudio on the system, all others tend to have compatibility with it in mind.
There are hold-out ALSA users (even Linux OSS users still around, I think) and I gather people who need well-performing audio for Serious Work (particularly anything latency-sensitive or requiring that multiple streams be mixed at high quality without errors), and have decided to use Linux for it, end up having to replace or bypass PulseAudio one way or another (this info may be out of date, but given PA's history, I kinda doubt it).
I think the Pulse situation is very similar to the one with systemd (they’re even by the same author IIRC). There are some haters, but if you’re a hater-hater than you can just ignore them (eg. GNOME IUUC depends on both Pulse and systemd, and haters of the dependencies who want the DE just have to find their own shims, like Gentoo’s, deal with some error messages (random games and things often give me a lot of audio-related ones, but generally work ok anyway) or just leave for another DE or WM).
There are hold-out ALSA users (even Linux OSS users still around, I think) and I gather people who need well-performing audio for Serious Work (particularly anything latency-sensitive or requiring that multiple streams be mixed at high quality without errors), and have decided to use Linux for it, end up having to replace or bypass PulseAudio one way or another (this info may be out of date, but given PA's history, I kinda doubt it).