If it weren't so sad, it'd be hilarious how long it took for sound to even be close to usable on Linux. Only in the past couple of years has it become reasonable to use Linux for any kind of serious audio work (and it is still weaker than Windows and Mac on many fronts, though the latency and RT issues have been resolved for some time). I started trying to use Linux for audio in 1995, when I was still going to school for audio recording. Only now is it actually something that one might consider doing real work with.

It's always been such an afterthought, and always so flaky. For me, it was the one thing that kept a Windows partition on most of my systems through all those years.