I could use dhcp rules but then I sometimes have to move my development machine to other places where of course I will be on a different dhcp server which I may not have admin access to. The workaround of having a shell script that sends a bunch of "ifconfig" commands does the job for me whilst still allowing me to use NM for wifi config but it just seems like something that should be unnecessary.
I sort of assume that most experience Linux people have experienced some sound issues at some point. My problem with pulseaudio has always been the slight latency that seems to happen between sound being sent by the program and played by the speakers which means that for example when an MP3 file is paused the sound continues for a fraction of a second. Sure this may not be a huge issue and I didn't even notice it for a while but as soon as I noticed it, it really started to grind on me. Not to mention that it makes the system terrible for doing any kind of audio editing.
The solution for this is to uninstall pulseaudio and go back to ALSA which is a bit of a pain in itself, but once you've achieved this you get odd problems like (in ubuntu anyway) the sound control panel applet disappears and you have to run alsamixer to change the volume, also volume control for some programs (such as spotify) stops working completely.
There are a number of other various small issues that can make desktop Linux a pain to use sometimes, this is why I am often surprised that canonical seem to prioritize redesigning the GUI every few releases over fixing stuff like this.
