Vive La Desktop Difference!

This can be viewed by looking carefully the sound system configuration dialogs in both environments. The GNOME version is very simple (simpler then even the commercial operating systems') and its functionality relies on very tight integration with the OS configuration - you don't need to choose devices or sound servers because its all been taken care for you. If - you poor sup - it hasn't then you are in deep trouble: there is simply no way to set it to use a different sound device, different driver set (OSS vs. ALSA) or even a different sound server. This is mainly a problem if you like to use both KDE apps (that like ARTS) and GNOME apps (that like ESD) at the same time. This is not an issue for the GNOME way of thinking, because there is no KDE in the GNOME world - there is only one way to interact with the user, and that is using the GNOME way.

Wow, this is probably the most incoherent rant I have ever read. WTF are you talking about? Do you know anything about how linux works? Using Gnome has absolutely nothing to do with your device drivers. If you want to use Alsa drivers, load them (or have the kernel autoload them). If you want to use OSS drivers you'll probably have to manually load them unless you get an early 2.6 kernel. Gnome will happily use whichever set of modules you have loaded. And by Gnome, I mean the sound mixer control applet because that is really all that is relevant. It is the applications that have to be aware of different sound drivers. So if you use Totem with the GStreamer backend, then you have to choose between GStreamer-oss and GStreamer-alsa, which there happens to be a little dialog for under the System menu.

Now, if you're talking about sound servers, that's a little bit different. ESD is designed to work with OSS because the OSS drivers don't handle multiple input streams. It is designed to work only with OSS because Alsa can handle multiple input streams and doesn't need ESD. So you're either using OSS/ESD or Alsa. There is no need to use both, and you can easily switch between the two in the system configuration dialogs. If you want to use something other than ESD, Gnome doesn't have a problem with that. It just ships with ESD and has a configuration dialog for ESD. If you want something else you have to install it yourself.

And what's this about not handling multiple devices? Did you see the little drop down selector for default device in the sound server dialog, or do you just like making stuff up to support your point?