Earlier quoted context omitted.
Resources that require low-latency low-level access cannot be multiplexes easily
Why couldn't the kernel perform simple mixing of the audio streams with just as low latency as something like JACK?
Re: Intel rejection of Ubuntu’s Mir patch forces Canonical to go own way
#101I've heard that you can get PulseAudio to connect to JACK, which in turn connects to ALSA. The idea here is that latency-sensitive applications that use routing will connect to JACK, while applications that connect to PulseAudio (like Skype, Firefox, etc.) don't care about latency. However I haven't been able to get this to work properly (why isn't this set up as the default on any of the distros I've tried this on?)