Most distributions shipped ALSA preconfigured with dmix, which means multiple applications could play sound at the same time just fine.

Which is why the whole "we must use pulseaudio even if it's terrible and has awful standards that blast volume or multiple streams won't work!" was so weird… everybody who tried knew that just removing pulseaudio the multiple streams kept working :)

So only those who never applied the scientific method kept insisting that without PA it was not possible to do that.

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skydhash an hour ago | parent [-]

I think PA allows for setting applications volumes and have a modular design. But it's kinda the poster child of overengineering (challenged by systemd now). Something like sndiod is more sensible for most desktop distro. People that need a more complex setup can bring in the big gun like pipewire.

	▲	LtWorf an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think the problem was over-engineering. I think the problem was that if you plugged in headphones it would instantly set the volume to 100% from whatever value it was before. Plus of course, initially you had to regularly run killall -9 pulseaudio to fix the sound. All in a moment when ALSA with dmix worked just fine. Sometimes I think fedora and ubuntu are trying to hinder linux as mainstream desktop.