> by 2010 it was as solid as anything else in tech.
Nah, it stayed flaky well past then.
> it was absolutely an improvement over the previous system which either needed manual configuration per program to choose whether to use ALSA, OSS, EsoundD, or Arts with success of portaudio and other sound systems too keep things interesting.
No it wasn't. It was just one more annoying option in the list.
> Even if you did get things working, I distinctly recall having to restart Firefox in order to play music because Firefox had the only available connection to the sound device.
That was a misconfiguration that was possible to do in some systems, sure. There were plenty that avoided it.
Nah, it stayed flaky well past then.
> it was absolutely an improvement over the previous system which either needed manual configuration per program to choose whether to use ALSA, OSS, EsoundD, or Arts with success of portaudio and other sound systems too keep things interesting.
No it wasn't. It was just one more annoying option in the list.
> Even if you did get things working, I distinctly recall having to restart Firefox in order to play music because Firefox had the only available connection to the sound device.
That was a misconfiguration that was possible to do in some systems, sure. There were plenty that avoided it.