PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

Followed by trying to figure out exactly what application was holding the sound card open. Or zombified sound mixing daemon, of which there were several.

(Unless you were one of the fortunate few to have a sound card that could natively handle multiple simultaneous streams!)

Still, even in its early days, PA was a _huge_ net improvement, and most of the issues that folks attributed to PA were really bugs in the underlying device drivers or applications themselves. (I recall the flash plugin being one of the worst offenders..)

(Something similar played out with NetworkManager/wpa_supplicant and wifi devices that didn't implement the WEXT APIs consistently, and/or applications that were written expecting the quirks of a single driver to apply everywhere)