from my understanding redhat threw pulseaudio into their fedora releases fairly early on. and then all the other major distros followed suit. i don’t think redhat can be faulted for this because they don’t really care about the desktop market much anymore. but the distros that have a large desktop following i.e. ubuntu should have maybe reconsidered.

and i don’t mean that like pulseaudio is a bad thing…as which seems to be the way the majority of people feel.
i just believe it went prime-time before it was ready, before ALSA was ready for it, and before apps were ready as well.
so there’s some breakage and i was mildly irritated like i imagine most people were. but me, i’m practical.
i’d rather have a bit of breakage for progress to happen. and i imagine with all the genius audio programmers out in the OSS community reviewing things..that pulseaudio must indeed be a good thing. whether i will use its features or not.
it’s progress.

and really the early adoption just puts the pressure on everyone to get their stuff working quickly.  so i think after like 2 more release cycles of the major distros that this whole thing will be put to bed. and audio will “just work” again. but people will probably still needlessly hate pulseaudio. which is stupid. if you can’t suffer a little bit for a good thing then use another OS…or create your own linux sound infrastructure and alter the apps to use it.