While still not correct with that in mind, the “initially” refers to a sound server a that sits above ALSA. There were others before Pulse, for example the aRts daemon and ESD. However, these were mostly used within their respective Desktop Environment while the rest used ALSA directly, so Pulse being the first Sound Server being widely used under Linux is one way to look at it. JACK on the other hand never left the (semi)professional niche I think.
In fairness to Pulse, Pipewire built heavily on its foundation; in fact, is initially was only supposed to be “Pulseaudio for video”, and Pulse led to huge improvements in ALSA and audio drivers. Pipewire simply couldn’t have worked as well back then as it does today if it had been released when Pulse was initially.
While still not correct with that in mind, the “initially” refers to a sound server a that sits above ALSA. There were others before Pulse, for example the aRts daemon and ESD. However, these were mostly used within their respective Desktop Environment while the rest used ALSA directly, so Pulse being the first Sound Server being widely used under Linux is one way to look at it. JACK on the other hand never left the (semi)professional niche I think.
In fairness to Pulse, Pipewire built heavily on its foundation; in fact, is initially was only supposed to be “Pulseaudio for video”, and Pulse led to huge improvements in ALSA and audio drivers. Pipewire simply couldn’t have worked as well back then as it does today if it had been released when Pulse was initially.