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@aeva

It's been over 20 years since audio made me switch from Linux to FreeBSD.

The new version of OSS is proprietary, what shall we do?

FreeBSD: Well, the old version is still BSDL, I guess we'll just fork it and add low-latency in-kernel sound mixing and extend it with the features OSS 4 added.

Linux: Rip that stuff out of the kernel and replace it with ALSA, which doesn't do software mixing in the kernel at all!

KDE: Wait, now two apps can't go 'ping' on Linux. Let's write a sound daemon.

GNOME: Wait, now two apps can't go 'ping' on Linux. Let's write a sound daemon.

KDE and GNOME: Oh, now KDE and GNOME apps can't go 'ping' at the same time. I guess we should agree on some standards.

PulseAudio: Hi everyone! I have come to save you from the perils of usable sound! But now you can have sound move from your speakers to USB headphones when you plug them in! Maybe! If you get the config right.

Everyone: Nooo, someone let Lennart Poettering write some code! We're doomed!

Hans Petter Selasky: Wait, that thing with moving audio sounds useful. Rewriting all of your software to do it? Less so. *Writes virtual_oss to provide a layer that lets you send audio to USB devices with userspace drivers or to different in-kernel devices*.

PipeWire: Okay everyone, we can all agree PulseAudio was a bad idea, but we've rewritten all of the code and have a migration path. I guess we're good now?

FreeBSD: Curses, hps just died. I guess he won't be fixing all the things anymore. We'll need to start maintaining virtual_oss and integrate it with the base system. Should probably also fix a bunch of issues in the kernel drivers and make sure low-latency sound mixing is reliable and robust with new hardware. By the way, software that you wrote 20+ years ago still works fine with the kernel and userspace drivers and has low-latency mixing.