Linux audio explained

“There’s a problem with the state of Linux audio, and it’s not
that it doesn’t always work. The issue is that it’s
overcomplicated.

“This soon becomes evident if you sit down with a piece of paper
and try to draw the relationships between the technologies involved
with taking audio from a music file to your speakers: the diagram
soon turns into a plate of knotted spaghetti.

“This is a failure because there’s nothing intrinsically more
complicated about audio than any other technology. It enters your
Linux box at one point and leaves at another. If we were drawing
the OSI model used to describe the networking framework that
connects your machine to every other machine on the network, we’d
find clear strata, each with its own domain of processes and
functionality.”

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