Two things, mainly. They do a lot of the production steps in-house, as opposed to having a web of subcontractors (who have their own subcontractors)for each component. But the big thing is just efficiency of scale. Building and launching 100 rockets per year doesn’t cost 100 times more than one launch per year.

It reads like different people wrote different sections of it

Pine64 sells ANC earbuds that (for the factory firmware) doesn’t have a companion app at all.

You said that Xorg being abandoned is the problem. How should we interpret that, other than a criticism of the decision-making process of the devs?

I also hear that ALSA has some support for multiple applications per device nowadays, though I understand it is much less pleasant to use than a fully featured sound server.

FYI

Many older sound chips had hardware support for mixing multiple streams, and so the alsa drivers for those happily allowed multiple apps to open and write to the /dev/snd/whatever device. Life was good and people got used to doing it this way.

Nowadays (since like 2000 lol), sound chips generally expect a single pre-mixed stream. So the sound device for those is exclusive open. The libalsa devs made it possible to have the first app to open the sound device act as the sound server for every other app that tries to open it later. But it was complicated and fragile and just a bad idea in retrospect.

Then the problem is that it’s abandoned, not that it has stagnated

By all means, feel free to start working on it!

All the people who developed Xorg for 20+ years decided that creating and working on Wayland was a better use of their time. But I’m sure you know better…

The problem isn’t that Xorg is spaghetti code (it’s pretty good for a large C project, imho). The problem is that the X11 protocol was designed to expose the capabilities of 1980s display hardware.

Stagnation here specifically does mean that nobody is making bug fixes or security patches anymore. Xorg is abandoned, kaput, a former software project.

The new architecture allows developers to fix one thing without accidentally breaking 3 others.

Pioewire handles audio and video pipelines between applications.