Can you hear me now?

In my long and ultimately unsuccessful struggle with Linux audio, I did come to the opinion that Pulse is on the right track technically. My main issue is that I wanted both low-latency triggered audio and zero-dropout music tracks at the same time. Sounds simple, but as far as I could tell, was impossible by design in everything up until Pulse.

In Pulse, it's merely impossible in practice. I get more glitches in its glitch-free playback than I did pre-Pulse (I'm using Fedora 10). But the underlying design seems like it may eventually lead to functional audio, finally.

I've also noticed that the various audio projects seem to attract some of the least empathetic developers around, people who are willfully clueless about usability. That happens in a lot of areas, but some areas -- like audio -- seem to actively chase away the people who could actually make things work nicely for other people. The pack senses the lack of purity and exploits it as a weakness or something.