Pulseaudio got popular and then became "irreplaceable" because it started playing a role that would have been played by HAL back in those days; i.e. setting up audio policy (routing, etc) whenever the kernel would fail at it. I was very critic of Pulseaudio, a sound server, incorporating this role, and argued that this complexity would make this project impossible to replace with a newer sound server when it inevitably came. I was proven wrong, albeit in my defense the replacement Pipewire did require a shitton of effort, and PA was becoming toxic in the meanwhile (see the Bluetooth codecs drama).
Pulseaudio's "big" technicaly improvement ("glitch-free" audio, aka interrupt-less, long buffers), and without a doubt its major cause of annoyances to users (since it exercised a lot of rarely used APIs), has not been adopted by Pipewire (which goes back to "low latency" + lots of interrupts) or any other sound server for the matter. (And Pipewire still manages to have better performance...)
I seem to remember that the main thing it did was bring "being maintained" to the table, because esound was unmaintained and stagnating. I still find this to be really ridiculous that people complain about supposed "hostile takeovers" in open source when, for a lot of categories of project, there are still somewhere between zero and one alternatives for any given thing. All you have to do to become the top dog is make something that does the bare minimum and doesn't crash, and has like, one person to triage bugs.
>PA was becoming toxic in the meanwhile (see the Bluetooth codecs drama).
I also still find this to be really ridiculous when people call maintainers "toxic" for being slow or for rejecting patches. Every open source project does that.
>has not been adopted by Pipewire
Actually it has, Pipewire implements the pulse protocol for backwards compatibility. The pipewire developers are also still encouraging developers to use it because it is a lot nicer to use than the pipewire API.
Well, that's true in so far as the useless DE-specific sound servers, but ALSA's userspace/plugin one (dmix) was definitely not abandoned and not stagnating. It was actually growing, and the advice then was to target ALSA API directly, not a specific sound server. The same advice is still valid today.
At least from my point of view, the problem with Linux sound has been one of APIs. OSS API is simple but limiting. ALSA API is a complex mess that no one bothers to implement fully and/or correctly. The various sound server APIs are sound server specific and range from the simple but limiting again (e.g. esd), complicated and still limiting (e.g. arts, PA) or just too complicated (e.g. jack). Using gstreamer as just a sound output API is not taken seriously.
The only reasonable option is to use a libao-like wrapper.
> I also still find this to be really ridiculous when people call maintainers "toxic" for being slow or for rejecting patches. Every open source project does that.
That's not the full story. Anyway, "being slow for accepting patches" is another word for "unmaintained" which you literally complained above and argued it is a point for justifying a replacement.
> Actually it has
No, it hasn't. What I was referring to is the glitch-free feature from Pulseaudio which is what actually broke most people's audio. This entire approach with longer buffers, few/no hardware interrupts and copious usage of ALSA's rewind feature (a deadly combination which broke most ALSA drivers). Compare with Pipewire which goes back to a more "traditional" small buffers and low latency approach.
Pipewire implementing the PA protocol is just more proof of the disaster that are the Linux audio APIs. Even Lennart said most people should not target the PA API.
