http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10495
--- Comment #200 from Ben Klein shacklein@gmail.com 2010-02-12 18:18:15 --- (In reply to comment #199)
What is the point of having: WINE->PULSE->ALSA instead of WINE->ALSA->PULSE->ALSA ?
I counter with the same logic: What's the point of having WINE->PULSE->ALSA instead of WINE->ALSA? Remove pulse from the equation (and use dmix where required) and you have a better working solution.
Might be, but PulseAudio is preconfigured in a majority of distributions and dmix is not. And dmix is not a better solution, because you can not easily adjust relative sound level from multiple programs with dmix. And you can not move a program to another sound card without restarting the program or stopping playback. Which in turn makes it nearly impossible easily configure dmix to support dynamically plugged in USB headsets for an average user. And such headsets are very popular now to reduce the interference noise from the built-in soundcards.
dmix is a "better solution" because it works. pulseaudio has extra features, but it's problems like this that make it unsuitable for the average user.
As for the USB headsets, you're right about dmix. So the current solution is either configure the headset (with dmix) before you start playing, or use pulseaudio which is known to not work as well (even with modern Wine), or learn how to configure JACK.
Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Linux Mint, and openSUSE at this point. I believe that easily makes it a majority by any count. And it has been here for nearly 2 years.
That's nowhere near the majority. distrowatch.com has plenty more. esd has been around for longer, ALSA's modern API has been around for longer still, and OSS before that. OSS is the de-facto standard for unix-like sound systems, and ALSA for Linux.