I see that linus torvalds will have competition pretty soon on who gets to be the overlord. Or maybe they can coexist, one in kernel land and the other in userspace land ;)
linus used to run binaries from his earliest days just to make sure that they still worked and constantly iterates that anything new should not break or remove features from userland (atleast until the screams aren't so noisy). Pulse brought new (the driver likely being playing music whilst playing games without apps being setup to use plugs could have been fixed in alsa) but removed/broke stuff too. It's surely wrong to get personal however and Pulse does fix a problem for many atleast but he would have to be much more subtle to make it in kernel land. It's said a fundamental problem with user space development is that often new projects are started because feature X is easier when starting from scratch and so your swapping rather than developing. Is that the case here or was there a difficult problem in getting alsa to work with multiple input sources at once by default or more likely was the difficulty integrating audio distribution which very few actually care about. -- _______________________________________________________________________ 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface' (Doug McIlroy) _______________________________________________________________________