It's not for everyone, but try a BSD. When PulseAudio first started showing up everywhere, I thought it was an anomaly, but it was really a harbinger. Since then Linux has been getting more like Windows every year (unpredictable behaviour, resource-hungry, lots of churn, tons of complexity for little benefit). The FreeBSD audio driver is in the kernel, it's tiny, and I never think about because it's never once caused me problems (and I'm quick to notice latency, etc. issues).

As someone mentioned elsewhere in the thread, by being an ALSA user you're already in a tiny minority of the Linux world. You might as well be using an OS where your values in are the majority - it's nice to not have to fight against the defaults.

I've been thinking about BSDs. I used to run a FreeBSD server a long time ago and I tend to like copies of the ports system that I've used on other OSes.

How hard is it to upgrade major versions? I seem to remember that this was a pain at some point, but this was so long ago that my memory is fuzzy.

Also, have you had any problems with hardware support? The machine I'm thinking of putting this on doesn't exist yet, so if there is a way I can avoid stupid hardware problems up front it would be useful to know about.

It's gotten much easier to both upgrade and to install software. Example:

To apply security patches:

  freebsd-update fetch  

  freebsd-update install

To upgrade to a new version of the operating system:

  freebsd-update -r 11.0-RELEASE upgrade

To install software:

  pkg install chromium

You can still use the ports system if you want to, but pkg is so much easier.

FYI, we're a long time Linux shop (mostly Ubuntu server) and are slowing moving away from it because I don't like the direction it is going (systemd, etc). I've got more than half of our systems on FreeBSD/OpenBSD now.

I agree with pppp - it's quite easy in the most common case. I've run into little problems, but rarely, and certainly no more than what I used to have with Linux.

Hardware support is like Linux a few years ago. That, and a few (esoteric or proprietary) packages that I've found missing are about the only downsides IMO.

FreeBSD has run fine with little to no configuration on all the desktops and servers I've tried, but laptops are a different story. OpenBSD has a better reputation there. My guess (and understand this is based on just my limited perspective) is that the biggest thing to be aware of is video cards (in particular the Intel integrated graphics are one or two generations behind).

Here's the offical word on drivers in general: https://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/CURRENT/hardware/support.ht...

Arch does not use PulseAudio by default, and I'd be surprised if that changed. It's my daily OS, and I'm quite fond of it.

That's good to know. I take it the rolling release model doesn't bother you? I've never tried it and I'm not sure if the occasional breakage that would happen will drive me crazy.

It's pretty simple to remove it from SuSE.

That's a relief, I've always liked SuSE.