also been tiptoeing around the state of audio on Linux and discovered that #OpenBSD’s sndiod has been ported over for quite a while. sadly, on Alpine, even though the software that supports the protocol is usually built without it, and alsa-sndio’s compat layer is abandoned by its developer.

even though there are examples of first-class support in some Linux distributions (e.g. Void Linux maintainers seem to care a lot about patching in sndio support in many applications), sadly on Alpine it’s this: https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/issues/13355.

the thing I liked while daily driving OpenBSD about sound was that it just worked. can’t say the same about the ALSA/Pulse/PipeWire mess—I've had my sound broken by updates thrice since August, and I’m using PipeWire, which is the least insane of the three... wish more people would care about even giving a shot to simple, robust and sane-ish solutions.