This makes me ponder on how old some of those “issues” are. I remember using ESD over OSS and being very happy to finally be able to hear sounds from multiple programs all together instead of having a single program monopolizing the audio output.

History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes.

That being said, even with all its issues, ever since ESD and now pulseaudio, this has been one of the reasons why I prefer to use Linux over anything else. Mostly for RTP streaming nowadays.

In fact, for a while, pipewire didn’t support RTP streams and I kept using pulseaudio just for this reason.