As a user who avoided Pulse for years, I feel your pain. But since I started writing audio apps for Linux, I realized that the Pulse Audio API is the least broken way to do audio on Linux. It is very comparable to Core Audio and DirectSound in terms of the most relevant features. ALSA should just give hardware access but instead it is bloated with plugins and tries to do everything.

There's really no excuse for not doing mixing and sample rate conversion in userspace (not all hardware can do it) and an audio server just makes more sense than plugins for client applications.

>> And I say this as a Linux user who doesn't use PulseAudio...

PulseAudio works great in Linux? We can switch easily between a headset mic, web cam mic, builtin mic, etc. I think this is still problematic on Windows.

Ubuntu has won the Desktop and Server Linux wars so the article is no longer valid. RedHat doesn't even care about Desktop Linux or consumers using Linux.

It's a classic piece that gets cited in mailing lists often these days (I actually saw it in debian-devel).

Because the point of a news site is to deliver information that is both new and interesting to the reader.

If something is from 5 years ago, it is drastically more likely that the reader either knows it already or is not interested, as opposed to things that are, say, less than a month old.

Especially if that information was reposted constantly, as that logic would allow.