Making Sense of the Audio Stack on Unix
Here's my Linux audio anecdote: I've never successfully gotten jackd to run on my computer(s) running Ubuntu or pop_os, and pulseaudio doesn't let me run with low enough latency to be usable in Bitwig. I don't want to spend my time digging through ancient forum posts on why jack/pulse can't "just work" when everything is fine on MacOS and Windows. A reboot is faster.<p>Sidenote, audio stacks are not fundamentally fragmented. DirectSound is deprecated in favor of WASAPI. ASIO only exists because DirectSound sucked, now WASAPI is good enough not to use ASIO moving forward (with some hiccups, like some software doing SRC under the hood because WASAPI doesn't let you programmatically select sample rate - RtAudio does this, for example).<p>CoreAudio has been stable for almost 20 years. It is the gold standard. The only problem is the almost complete lack of documentation except for the CoreAudio mailing list.<p>If you're writing audio software the solution is to use WASAPI on windows, CoreAudio on Mac, and tell Linux users to use Windows or MacOS if they want low latency audio.