However, like systemd, PulseAudio large and opinionated so it's not everyone's cup-of-tea.
Ehh...... I'll disagree with that. I have ~50% success rate of it working on my devices in the past 5 years.
Most modern distros come with pulseaudio by default, which means I'd guess that over 90% of linux users use pulseaudio successfully. I've run workshops helping people install linux on their machines and I've never run into a system where pulseaudio did not work that alsa did.
Which means they almost certainly include libasound.so, because PA still depends on ALSA in the kernel. Even in the case of distros that only use the ALSA emulation interface for PA, the traditional ALSA interface is still provided. Lots of software would break without that support.
It's more accurate to say most distros support both PA and ALSA by default.
> use pulseaudio successfully
Note that "successfully" doesn't imply "enjoyably" or "preferentially". I still hear complaints regularly from people that hate newer (PA-focused) distros that introduced a lot of latency problems. Movie audio sync became inconsistent (hundreds of ms latency, very high variability), and UI audio cues playing up to 3s (3000ms) after the visual changes.
This is what bothers me so much about discussions about PA. There are legitimate problems with it, and whenever someone mentions them, everyone else chimes in to say that they are the minority, that they are doing it wrong, etc etc. This is how polarization happens.
I've had a much higher success rate with alsa ootb.
It’d be preferable if for Linux there was an audio server closer to what JACK is (although both JACK and JACK2 aren’t ideal either).
(That said, I mix hardware mixing and pulse for my purposes)
In my case, I use 3 audio cards, an internal one for speakers, a Behringer Xenxy Q502 for headphones and microphone, and a backend streaming to my phone (in case I wanna walk around the house listening to music via headphones).
Mixing audio into streams for recording, live stream, headphones, etc isn’t easy even with hardware cards unless you spend a LOT of money.
The trade-off for latency in PA is lower power usage. I think most consume users are pretty happy that their sound system does not suck tons of energy just to offer sub-10ms of audio latency.
> JACK
AFAIK, PulseAudio and Jack 2 can work pretty seamlessly together thanks to a new dbus API (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Examples#Pul...).