Let’s be fair here. PipeWire is leaps and bounds ahead of pulse and I was super happy when I could drop pulse. But pulse predates PipeWire by a decade and introduced concepts that were previously rather complex in Linux. It’s no coincidence its interface was adopted so quickly by audio tools and that it’s the recommended interface for PipeWire today (until devs are comfortable with recommending their own). Lennart saw the need and provided a solution which, in retrospective, could be much improved - but until PipeWire, nobody put in the work.

I too had my fair share of issues with PA. But it also solved some fundamental ones for me. I don’t miss meddling with .asoundrc or whatever it was to get dmix working. Pulse should not be measured against PipeWire, but rather ALSA, OSS and the stuff that the DEs brought with them (aRts…). It wasn’t always pretty. Early Pulse, however, wasn’t either.

Also, audio was originally not even in scope for PipeWire - it was touted as “PulseAudio for video”. So pulse didn’t exactly have a bad reputation even among PipeWire devs.