In the beginning there was oss, and then there was alsa. In the alsa days it was easy to get any given thing to work, but sometimes it was hard to make two separate things work at the same time.
Pulseaudio fixed this, but it took a long time, distros didn’t start adopting it until 2008 or so, and back then it wasn’t all that solid.
The meme makes no sense now that we have pipewire, but it’d have been fair between 1998 and 2009, depending on your configuration and usage case.
to be fair it does still make sense with lower-level distros like arch. usually it is as simple as installing pipewire + wireplumber or whatever, but that sometimes doesn’t work out of the box and there are also other ways to do audio
In the beginning there was oss, and then there was alsa. In the alsa days it was easy to get any given thing to work, but sometimes it was hard to make two separate things work at the same time.
Pulseaudio fixed this, but it took a long time, distros didn’t start adopting it until 2008 or so, and back then it wasn’t all that solid.
The meme makes no sense now that we have pipewire, but it’d have been fair between 1998 and 2009, depending on your configuration and usage case.
to be fair it does still make sense with lower-level distros like arch. usually it is as simple as installing pipewire + wireplumber or whatever, but that sometimes doesn’t work out of the box and there are also other ways to do audio