PulseAudio gives me a better out-of-the-box experience than any other sound system, bar none.

Guess I'm the only one who had a cron job restarting the PulseAudio process regularly.

I had to regularly restart PulseAudio to keep Firefox's context menu working :(

On the one hand, PulseAudio really would have benefitted from a built-in watchdog to restart it its early days. On the other hand, before PulseAudio, I never really had working sound at all, so I consider PulseAudio to have been an improvement.

You know you are old when the first thing that comes to mind is a User Friendly strip...

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19990302

That might be true today (I no longer have linux desktops, so I have no idea), but it took years of buggy (or extremely hard to configure) releases to reach that point.

Which was the result of Ubuntu shipping buggy beta builds when everyone told them not to do it. So blame Ubuntu and not PulseAudio.

My biggest problems were on Fedora, but it's not been really easy on Archlinux and Gentoo either...

It was a nightmare for me and several other local users on SuSE/openSUSE as well, so I think we're down to just Debian and Mandriva as major distros of that period that might not have had serious issues (Slackware was very conservative about integrating it). I suspect @adestefan used other distros minimally if at all and got lucky as far as PulseAudio went and I'm a bit envious. Problems with PA were a frequent topic in our LUG for 3-4 years and only a fraction of that was distro devs testing it early. Really they should have just used "PulseAudio: More powerful than OSS and more stable than Flash!" as the slogan.