>>1446>>1448I'll actually answer your question sorry. In Linux everything is built on top of ALSA. JACK, Pulseaudio and Pipewire are all just a way to pipe audio into ALSA -> sound card driver -> speakers. You're getting latency because pulseaudio is a really crappy sound server and has been for a long time. Hence why pipewire is the new shiny.
For pro audio applications you want JACK and nothing else. You probably want a realtime kernel to. For just listening (not production) you can get by with just ALSA. The only value is something like pulseaudio is the ability to have multiple devices plugged in at the same time. In other words one application doesn't get direct control of your sound card. You can do mixing in ALSA to (that's all pulse is doing) but you have to manually configure it. Which isn't hard but ALSA is a bit of a pain to config. Pulseaudio is easier to config but breaks randomly for no reason and has really bad latency because it's doing all the mixing with the CPU before sending sound to the sound card.
OSS is also good but rarely used anymore.
For stuff that claims to be pulseaudio only you can use apulse to pipe it into ALSA. Main one will probably be your web browser. apulse works find in my experience.
You could try pipewire but I haven't used it much (moved on to JACK years ago). It tries to be a better pulseaudio. But it's from the same developers and most of what they've created is crap over the years. But it'll no doubt be the new standard for most things like Ubuntu if it isn't already.
Having realtime kernel is more for people that do stuff like use MIDI devices or plug in guitars and other instruments.