Honestly, most of these are necessary evils these days. New sound cards are cheaper than old ones, and don't support software mixing. Hence Pulseaudio. (Not to mention things like Bluetooth headsets, which don't appear as ALSA devices and instead are natively supported by Pulseaudio.)
NetworkManager is similar -- editing wpa_supplicant configurations is a nightmare. It works from the command-line now, so it's not like it's imposing anything on you anymore.
Hasn't software mixing been in ALSA for ages, with the dmix plugin? I don't think Pulseaudio is necessary for everything.
I do see the Networkmanager is a necessary evil, but why does it have to be so awful? It's great if it works, but if it doesn't then solving the problem is extremely hard because of the bloated, uncommunicative nature of the program.
Pulseaudio can abstract over multiple devices, allowing you to mute individual applications, move streams between physical pieces of hardware, and so on. Audio mixing in kernel-space is brittle and the wrong place for the code anyway. Doing it in userspace is more secure, more flexible, and generally a good design.
In theory, maybe. In practice, Pulseaudio is just horrible and gave me troubles I have never experienced with ALSA. I'm personally convinced it's one of the biggest mistakes made in the Linux world.
However, if we're going to put the sound server in userspace, which isn't a bad idea, the kernel side should be broken down. This would be an excellent time to deprecate ALSA!
Yes, wpa_supplicant is a nightmare, this is one thing FreeBSD got right
I didn't need PA with any of the new sound cards, and the BT dongles don't "support" PA (some are certainly ALSA, but others may "get in" in another way), but what happens is that it makes it easier to use it with it
That being said, I don't care to use new hardware, unless it's something essencial like a video card, chipsets, etc
Arch has a very good user community. It's worth search the Arch forums even if you're not using Arch. They should be commended for their approach to clear documentation.
Some other minimal distributions include:
Linux From Scratch:
TinyCore: Took over where DSL left off, with better philosophy.
Slitaz: good internationalisation, runs entirely from ram.
TomsRtBt: the most Linux on a single floppy
Puppy: Weird and non standard but oddly popular
DSL: Also very popular among a certain group, was dead for years but is just recently getting a new release
Obviously some of these are scarily odd: single user, everyone has root, etc etc.
Well, I'm using a BSD system right now (that 'feline' one). Too bad it's got something messed up, hopefully it will get better with the latest version.
I think you are implying that OSX is a BSD. Just because you have some BSD userland utilities doesn't make you a BSD. OSX has a totally different kernel than any BSD (mach).
The Mach micro-kernel was originally a BSD kernel fork (iirc 4.2BSD, when dinosaurs roamed the earth). NeXT/Apple added various things like DriverKit and later IOKit to Mach. Apple also took the network stack from FreeBSD, which is traditionally rather modular (for high performance kernel code, anyway).
Together they make up the current XNU hybrid kernel. You can look at most of the sources at opensource.apple.com
There's certainly lots of FreeBSD in OSX, but it's not like OSX is just FreeBSD with a sugar coated Apple UI.
Put modern packages, but not "new" packages . No pulseaudio, packagekit, networkmanager. You don't need to worry about automounting usb for example
Get me the latest version of KDE 3
That would be very fast in any modern machine