> My very own system did not work with Pulseaudio when I tried to switch, that was years later. I still use only ALSA because of that experience. At that time Pulseaudio was garbage, it should never have been used then. It only got acceptable later - but still has bugs and issues.

I remember the transition to PulseAudio. Initially, most things were broken, and we still had some applications that worked only with OSS so the whole audio suite in Linux was a mess. I remember that I already switched from Fedora (very broken)/Ubuntu (slightly less broken) to Arch Linux, and for sometime I kept using ALSA too.

Eventually, between switching Desktop Environments (I think Gnome already used PulseAudio by default them, while KDE was optional but also recommended(?) PA), I decided to try PulseAudio and was surprised how much better the situation was afterwards (also, OSS eventually died completely in Linux systems, so I stopped using OSS emulation afterwards).

With the time it was getting better and better until PulseAudio just worked. And getting audio output nowadays is much more complex (Bluetooth, HDMI Audio, network streaming, etc). So yeah, while I understand why PipeWire exists (and I am planning a migration after the next NixOS release that will bring multiple PipeWire changes), I am still gladly that PulseAudio was created.