"don't we all just love ALSA?"
Ever tried to get PulseAudio working on a headless machine?
Canonical has pushed a bunch of important kernel security updates. In the aging Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, the fixes are described here. Only one of the vulnerabilities is remotely exploitable – CVE-2015-8767, a race condition when handling heartbeat timeouts, and can be exploited to cause a system crash. There are three local crash …
The Linux sound system was not made any easier when Pulse Audio came along (thanks Lennart, you should have been shot for this long before you were allowed to meddle with init).
The Linux audio environment is overly complicated by the need to be backward compatible to all of the previous sound systems. Because there are so many applications still in use that are no longer developed, it's necessary to maintain ALAS and OSS compatibility (thankfully, the Enlightenment Sound Daemon is mostly dead and can be ignored), and layering on new meta-systems like PA and Jack don't make life easier.
In some respects, I would have been happy sticking with ALSA and avoiding all the pain PA brought.