One of the greatest things about SuSE & YaST with the use of Alsa is the easyness of configuring sound under Linux (although sometimes this can be a little confusing ... :-)) The thing is, what if you have to configure a PCI soundcard (on-board in the case that I have to face now) in Slackware for example, that is a distro that doesnt have any friendly tool and you have to do it the old-fashion way... Would you go for alsa or you would use the kernel support for sound (if the kernel supports PCI-sound, since I am not sure cause the Sound-HOWTO only made alussion to ISA cards). This is applicable to SuSE as well, cause I believe it is much better to learn things, especially in exciting *nix world, to things the hard way. Thanks alot, Raúl