You wont find a sound setup that will work in all Linux distros, it is how the sound landscape in Linux is. However in terms of API availability, ALSA is available everywhere, is the "native" sound API and people can use it without installing anything extra. This is why i say 'in practice' - with anything else you'd need to rely on dependencies that may or may not exist. ALSA is the Linux sound system.

BTW what i describe is how Debian was for years when i used it by default, not just testing. It is possible that the version of Debian Pinebook Pro shipped was altered. Or something else wasn't configured as i had it, who knows.