Comment 49 for bug 198453

ESD is in a bad way atm, it seems to be causing everything to hang now and again. Disabling it, however, only loses you login/logout sounds.

With that perspective, maybe using PA purely as a drop-in for ESD and nothing else wouldn't be too bad a situation. Of course, this would be using ALSA DMix.

I still think going the whole way with PA is the better solution.