@lain @sun The components in Windows, BSD/MacOS are integrated from top to bottom, in what you call Linux the OS is the sum of what would be multiple disconnected companies working with a common shared core.

The correct approach to Linux is to always consider what program you are running to perform what task.

The concept is no different when you install notepad+ in Windows, in Linux this concept is just extended to every component including the base tools, the people who wrote the ls or the cat command do not work for the same company that does the kernel so to speak.

This is why different Linux distributions use different tools for similar tasks and why they are different from each other and have different problems and different behaviour. This is also why you have dozen of desktops with different levels of maturity for example which seem to always disagree on what's the best approach while on Windows you have an unified vision and experience for good or bad.

The audio in MacOS was done by Apple for AppleOS to run on Apple hardware, vertically integrated, of course it works, they paid their devs so it works out of the box.

In Linux several parts had to be worked on separately, first the kernel driver part (alsa) then the kernel itself had to improve, then people wrote software mixers (oss, pulse, jack) each tryng to solve the same problem with different priorities, then came pipewire which is better than the rest and does pulse and jack protocols too.

Wayland is the same, however wayland's adoption is a disaster because as someone mentioned it is a full 100% incompatible rewrite and an untested paradigm.