The audio situation is a total debacle. n-1 of the sound systems need to be killed so we can focus on making the remaining one work really well.
It's really funny that this is his first point, because I ran into it just two days ago... the microphone jack on my laptop, which worked fine in Ubuntu hardy, intrepid, and jaunty, no longer works in karmic thanks to the upgrade to pulseaudio (bug has existed in launchpad since november). It's insane that something so simple (analog input jack) on such common hardware (Intel 82801i) could be non-functional in 2010. Of all the weird driver problems I've had in 12+ years of Linux use, this one is probably the most shocking.
It is hard to believe that sound can be so broken, after all these years (and looking at the huge strides other parts of the desktop have made).
If Ubuntu wants to be the uber-friendly, runs anywhere (just works!) distro, they need to avoid these types of regressions from one version to the next. I know they're not in charge of all the upstream work, but they are the ones that make the decision on what version of pulse audio to use (or X version, or whatever). Instead it seems that Ubuntu always tries to stay on the bleeding edge, which is inevitably going to be broken for some people.
But it's not that simple : often, the bleeding-edge fixes others annoying bugs and it's really hard to have an estimate of the affected population. Maybe they should add an extra step to their installer that would allow to send anonymously data about your hardware configuration to Canonical ?
I think Fedora has led on the bleeding edge of pulseaudio. Ubuntu apparently had a borked setup in one version of Ubuntu, but the same code was running well on Fedora.
Having said that, pulseaudio really seems to bring out the cranks and probably most of the issue is that it's become something that it's okay to complain about, rather than something that people get behind and fix.
It is however clearly the future and like many things in Linux ripping out mature half-solutions to replace them with newer full solutions is going to cause regressions for some. As long as Linux is making progress on average then it's all part of the game.
It's really funny that this is his first point, because I ran into it just two days ago... the microphone jack on my laptop, which worked fine in Ubuntu hardy, intrepid, and jaunty, no longer works in karmic thanks to the upgrade to pulseaudio (bug has existed in launchpad since november). It's insane that something so simple (analog input jack) on such common hardware (Intel 82801i) could be non-functional in 2010. Of all the weird driver problems I've had in 12+ years of Linux use, this one is probably the most shocking.