From Spiked:
If life ever returns to normal, one thing no one will miss from the lockdown era is the 'TV goldfish'. For over a year, we've watched the disembodied, pixelated faces of contributors to live TV mouth their words out of sync with their audio, gulping away as if in a private fish tank. This isn't the exception for internet video, it's the norm.
John Day is one of the internet's greybeard founding fathers. For a decade he has been advancing a set of improvements to the current mainstream internet protocols. His proposals – called RINA (Recursive Internetwork Architecture) – revisit and build on Louis Pouzin's founding concept of datagrams (data packets). Simplifying these features allowed the original inter-networking protocols (IP) to get out of the door in the 1980s and 1990s, and allowed for the rapid growth of the internet. But the current system we have – TCP/IP – is holding back new innovation.
See also: Internet outage illustrates lack of resilience at heart of critical services
The Guardian view on the internet outage: we need resilience, not just efficiency
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 10 2021, @05:33PM
Any of the above.
Alsa is old, but still works most of the time if you only want one output.
Pulse Audio works fine for regular desktop use.
Jack (which predates Pulse FYI) is excellent if you have a static studio setup and need low latency, network audio, or other kinds of specialised/professional audio setup.
Pipewire is still work-in-progress, but now pretty stable for general use. It's aimed to be a replacement for Pulse Audio, while also bringing some of the features of Jack to a more casual audience.
Compared to Windows? Abso-fucking-lutely!