Hi
debiman,
Thanks very much for your reply.
debiman wrote:do you have any experience with it?
I've used OSS4 exclusively since the year 2010 and posted about how to get it up and running in Debian 6 "Squeeze" either by installing it from the official repository as detailed
here or by compiling it from upstream source, as detailed
here; however, both these howtos are out of date for current stable.
debiman wrote:how does it differ from ALSA?
I think that one has to try it in order to form one's own opinion; for me, sound quality is far superior to ALSA, so much so that I prefer not to listen to music without OSS4, but a lot may depend on one's system and sound card. There is a lot of useful documentation available; for example, see:
wiki.archlinux.org and the
ossnext.trueinstruments.com/forum/.
debiman wrote:is it more popular in other distros?
From what I've read about it, ALSA—hilariously alluded to as "a dog's breakfast"—in this old forum
topic with PulseAudio has become the homogenized default for most, if not all, distros, similar in a way to systemd. Although FreeBSD, like other BSDs, has its own implementation of the OSS API, I got OSS4 to work fine back in 2013 as I posted—as "woodman"—at
forums.freebsd.org/threads/40033/.
OSS4 packages are no longer available in current stable so I again had to build from source as detailed at
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=134126.
I think that switching from ALSA to OSS4 involves quite a lot of time, effort and configuration but it's one well worth making. And then it takes some time to get used to it. The first step is to find out if the sound device is
supported.