Yup. I'm planning on PCIe interface, not USB and this is but one of the reasons why as partly covered in the video.

See? I just knew hazel was a sharp vet of proper practice

Maybe I'm just ignorant on it, but what did PA do to coerce its use? It isn't like systemd where it pulled in a ton of separate programs and then EOLed the originals. As far as I know, it's mainly other developers that have decided to not support anything but pulse due to convenience. And if making a program convenient to use is coercive, then there's a lot of those out there...

But I'm of an open mind and would love to hear otherwise...

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This is completely off-topic, but hard to resist commenting on.

Regardless of the value of its contributions - and it has indeed made some very substantial contributions - the more I read about the commercialization of Linux, and GNU/Linux as a whole, it seems that Red Hat has steadily gained control, and now exerts a seriously disproportionate amount of influence on our whole ecosystem.

I do not philosophically oppose corporate control. But in an area I care so deeply about, I trust a _successful_ commercial entity about as far as I can throw its CEO.

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So, probably your are the owner of SuSE GMBH, that German company which developed ALSA both as kernel drivers and user space?
So, probably you are the owner of HP, Oracle, Google, RedHat, AMD, Intel and other more thousands companies which pay for the development of Linux Kernel?
So, probably you are the owner of SuSE GMBH, which was the main sponsor of KDE until the v5?
So, probably you are the owner of HP, AMD, Intel, RedHat and many other companies which pay for the X.org development?
...

And I can continue worth of dozens of pages.

I think what s/he is stating is that Redhat seems to have a disproportionate control over the Linux landscape compared to pretty much any other company. So much of what they decide becomes the "standard" for Linux. All the other companies you listed above are able to sometimes influence things with their respective projects, but none of those companies had direct control over what they sponsored.

And I can't seem to find anything about ALSA being developed by SUSe. Rather it was by Jaroslav Kysela, who was eventually employed by SUSe, but it was never a SUSe project (just as RedHat employs people who work on the kernel but do not run the kernel).

If we will trust the Hollywood teachings, is obviously that we should "follow the money to find the real bosses", and I think that the noticed "disproportionate control over the Linux landscape" is exactly because of the "disproportionate financial investment within the Linux landscape"

Zhao, it's a meritocracy. The reason why you see corporations leading the way is because they have customers and bills to pay, therefore they invest time and money into creating and maintaining the programs they need and their customers want/need. That is how capitalism works, you get out what you put in. If you do not like corporate influence then I have some bad news for you, you are out of options...BSD's, Unix, Linux all are under corporate influence(s).

The world will await your foundation that creates a competitive system from kernel to userspace with zero monetary influence. Better be one massive money tree.

But if you're saying that, what negative things have been brought out with KDE4, X.org, the kernel, or ALSA? Sponsoring doesn't always mean trying to force their hand. A lot of members have provided money to Pat to keep things going with Slackware, but that doesn't mean that any of us have control over Slackware.

Now, if you have some specific examples, that could change things, but Company X merely providing financial support for a project doesn't mean that the project is now being controlled by Company X.

Neither am I the owner of Facebook, Oracle, Palantir Technologies, or Electronic Arts. I can positively continue for about a couple more paragraphs before being bored.

More power to you if you want to support these corporations by wilfully submitting to their wishes. I am just sharing what's on my mind. That's all.

EDIT:
To clarify, I was not trying to say I do not welcome commercial support. It would be foolish to think Linux would ever be able to support such a massive variety of hardware, or that GCC would be able to rival the best commercial compilers without the money and resources of big players.

I am just worried that the world of Linux, GNU, and BSD might be more fragile than most of the community seems to believe. I honestly hope that I am completely wrong about this.

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It is a subtle distinction but I think it does matter if nothing else then as a change in direction to FOSS. Example - OSS and ALSA are at their most fundamental function the same things - sound servers. We could probably include others like ESD and aRTS but i don't know those in detail. All I know is that all of those still are supported and not superceded by ALSA in that applications can interchange any of those and still deliver audio. PA isn't even a sound server yet it locks it all down. If it didn't Pat V wouldn't have had to -----

1) Wait for the Bluetooth hard dependency to disappear
2) Provide a script to remove PA's exclusive control
3) Provide altered libraries to allow ALSA to work w/o PA

That said, I agree with you that those situations weren't all directly caused or mandated by PA and are the responsibility of third parties but the design of PA most definitely allowed and encouraged that position. If that weren't true it seems to me that by use of the common string for "System Default" would allow Jack or any other I/O manager like PA or Jack designated as "System Default" to be implemented by any app dev with no further concern for what actually was "System Default". They could just as easily as with PA simply washed their hands of having to deal with that issue. Given much of "Voldemort's" other work especially since his employ with RedHat, and now including IBM's acquisition of RedHat, I'm pretty sure I see an end game strategy here.

So apart from my main concern with PA as an unworkable, hard to avoid burden, I also oppose it on philosophical grounds since I see it as a threat to FOSS, the concept of which I happen to think is an important part of what makes Capitalism a healthy and viable system. Once lockdowns begin, progress as well as freedom suffers which is anathema to a truly Free Market.

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I don't think any packages required patches to work without pulseaudio, they are just built in an system without pulseaudio installed. This was fairly easy for Pat to support because most upstream projects do not have a direct or indirect hard dependency on pulseaudio.

Huh? PulseAudio is by design, definition and as a software stack a sound server.

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That's a fairly strong opinion. My experience has shown the opposite, on all 3 counts.

In the strict definition of "sound server" it is my understanding it is not. It has zero means (has no kernel module for hardware interaction) to activate the generation or translation of audio data. It is like a conductor of a symphony orchestra and not a musician of any kind. It relies on ALSA or something like it to do make sound. PA just "orchestrates" that sound once it is made.

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