Comment 274 for bug 371897

Any sound system that's supposed to be configuration-free shouldn't need a wiki page like this: http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup . Or this: http://alsa.opensrc.org/DmixPlugin.

I personally didn't have any issue with software mixing or manual configuration with Alsa+dmix, ie, without PA in the past 3 years. Yeah, a long time ago I had to config dmix manually. On my two Ubuntu distros I get long sound delays with PA, even in Tuxracer. But as this discussion indicates, other people had different experiences.

Let me define my personal criteria for when the Linux sound system is useable: I have a lot of different computers here. I am using a few non-wine Linux apps with sound(skype, ut2004, quake 3, amarok, some other voip app, tuxracer.

To stick with the number 6: I want to be able to download 6 different distros, install them on any of my computers. I don't care what the sound system name is, but it should be the same on all of them. I don't care what kind of API it uses. I don't care what API the different apps talk to it with. But I want sound in all of my 6 sound apps working out of the box in all 6 distros on all of my 6 computers. Once these 6*6*6=216 combinations work out of the box, I'll say that the Linux sound system is useable.