Windows has a sound server too, you know. I believe Core Audio on Mac does too. A large part of why audio is such a CF under Linux is that PulseAudio is incredibly badly written and poorly maintained. My favourite was the half-finished micro-optimization that broke some of the resamplers because the author got bored and never modified them to handle the change, which somehow made it all the way into a release. I dread to think what they'd do with powerful tools like asynchronous I/O.