I don't personally think this can be blamed on Linux - Audio works on Linux as well as OSX does, when the hardware is selected and configured, as it is on OSX. Linux has alternative and competing - and thriving - audio subsystems, and this means that systems integration has to pay attention to what its doing. This didn't happen in Androids' case; where other Linux distros had rock-solid and professional-quality audio subsystems and software integration, Android had an NIH implementation that ended up having to re-invent the wheel, to boot.
> where other Linux distros had rock-solid and professional-quality audio subsystems and software integration
Such as? Remember we're talking Linux in the 2005-era (~2.6.10-ish), not Linux today. JACK was still fairly new at that time. ALSA was still mostly broken at the time. Most stuff still wanted OSS. Basic "does sound come out of the speakers?" was often broken, and god help you if you wanted two things to play audio at the same time.
And you still need to solve the driver problem, which JACK, etc... don't help with at all.
> And you still need to solve the driver problem...
Um. If we're talking about 2005, we're talking about Android.
If we're talking about Android, we're talking about brand-spanking new hardware on a brand-spanking new phone.
This means that the audio driver didn't exist, which means that it was being written from scratch. This makes the "driver problem" a non-issue.
> Remember we're talking Linux in the 2005-era (~2.6.10-ish), not Linux today. ... ALSA was still mostly broken at the time. Most stuff still wanted OSS.
I never tried to do any "pro audio", [0] but that's not how I remember it. ALSA worked just fine. Anything that wanted OSS worked well enough with ALSA's OSS-compat API. I can't remember if the software mixer was around or not at the time, but I remember that when it did arrive, it eliminated that problem with single-stream sound cards.
[0] But -as I remember it- most folks doing pro audio used specialized, standalone hardware for it back then.
However, none of the folks I knew at the time who doing professional recording were using PCs or Macs to do the recording and mixing, they were using standalone gear.
It's entirely possible that the folks I knew were not a representative sampling of all sound engineers.
I think you've got it backwards. Audio latency on desktop Linux machines is actually lower than on OSX these days, and prior to Panther the audio latency on OSX was much higher.
iOS inhereted a strong foundation for this as OSX has a history of strong support for this sort of content creation. Linux does not.