So far we have mostly managed to ignore the morons calling for the death of PulseAudio, hopefully that will continue as well.

Pulse is new code, not a rewrite of anything. Yes, ESD was a sound server too, but the similarity ends there.

Many of PulseAudio's problems are caused by "iffy" stuff in ALSA drivers, and the ALSA folks are working to fix the bugs Pulse exposes. Many more are caused by distro people making questionable decisions on how to set it up (see Ubuntu/rtkit).

I'm sure glad that PA isn't going anywhere, despite all the uninformed hate flying around.

Budgets are outlined more than one year ahead of time, so that people can actually plan for the future. They aren't usually set in stone, because as circumstances change it may be necessary to adjust them, but that doesn't mean they don't exist, or that changing them won't cause issues for the department. Giving a smaller than expected increase in budget IS a budget cut, because until that moment plans have been made with the higher number in mind: a change to that number will require cuts to payroll, purchasing, operational costs, or any of the other expenses that the program must pay. If you can imagine attempting to operate a business on a budget that you cannot predict more than 12 months in advance, you might just get an idea why it's necessary to make those kinds of assumptions.

Get it?

Oh, and inflation makes each dollar worth a little bit less than it was before. If you have a budget that doesn't go up from one year to the next, it is effectively going down whether the numbers actually say so or not.

Thanks for playing.