The Tangled History of Linux Audio
The original Linux audio subsystem was Sound Blaster 16, which “just happened” because SB16 sound cards had the best support and a nice API. Those of us who are old enough to remember i386 PCs might also remember that competing brands used SB16 emulation because it was the path of least resistance. This evolved into the Open Sound System (OSS), which is portable across all Unix and Unix-type operating systems. It still exists and is maintained, and it is often confused with the OSS-compatible module in ALSA.
OSS fell out of favor as sound cards got cheaper and depended more on software to handle mixing, instead of doing the mixing in hardware. And so ESD (Gnome) and aRts (KDE) were born; these took care of mixing ...
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