Man, this has been a long journey. At the beginning, there was OSS, a sound system developed by Hannu Savolainen for Linux in 1992 and ported to other Unixes also. Then Jaroslav Kysela implemented a specific sound driver (around 1998) outside of OSS for the brilliant Gravis Ultrasound card, which eventually was abstracted to ALSA. I think it’s still questionable whether this OSS=>ALSA move was a smart one, but oh well, it happened.
Then we had several different sound servers over the years. I remember ESD, which was developed for the Enlightenment Desktop and later adopted by Gnome. KDE had Arts. JACK never was really adopted outside of the professionals who needed low latency audio. And then Pulseaudio (2004, much gnashing of teeth) and now Pipewire (2017).
I hope the journey is ending now. Audio doesn’t seem like the kind of problem that needs to be rewritten frequently. Almost nothing has changed on the hardware side in a decade to my knowledge.
Man, this has been a long journey. At the beginning, there was OSS, a sound system developed by Hannu Savolainen for Linux in 1992 and ported to other Unixes also. Then Jaroslav Kysela implemented a specific sound driver (around 1998) outside of OSS for the brilliant Gravis Ultrasound card, which eventually was abstracted to ALSA. I think it’s still questionable whether this OSS=>ALSA move was a smart one, but oh well, it happened.
Then we had several different sound servers over the years. I remember ESD, which was developed for the Enlightenment Desktop and later adopted by Gnome. KDE had Arts. JACK never was really adopted outside of the professionals who needed low latency audio. And then Pulseaudio (2004, much gnashing of teeth) and now Pipewire (2017).
I hope the journey is ending now. Audio doesn’t seem like the kind of problem that needs to be rewritten frequently. Almost nothing has changed on the hardware side in a decade to my knowledge.