Audio Working (Today); Maybe Popping Mint & Ubuntu from Active Stack and Pushing them to Used Stack

Audio is working today on my Linux Mint 13 64b system, which is a pleasant surprise. It's been stuttering the last few weeks, and after much Googling it appears to be a known problem with PulseAudio, one of Linux's several albatrosses. As soon as I read speculation that it would be fixed in Mint 14, I spent a little while pondering OSS, but I have work to do, and clearly the Ubuntu/Mint flavors of Linux are not cut out for that. Is it time to go back to Debian? My recollection was that, as of a few years ago, Debian mostly worked. Or do I try out Arch Linux?

The biggest albatrosses around Ubuntu/Mint's indistinguishable necks? Unity and Gnome Shell, and the notion that we're more interested in crippling desktop and laptop computers to look like smart phones than in, again, actually getting our work done.

Linux Mint 13 PulseAudio Stuttering

[ Note added 2012-07-17: the below was only a temporary fix. 13 days later, PulseAudio is stuttering again, with a vengeance. For now I'm watching this thread. ]

Recently my 64b desktop developed a bad stutter. I originally thought it was a rhythmbox problem, but it turned out to be a PulseAudio problem. The fix is here--thanks to MRA2011!

Summary:
In emacs or a lesser editor open /etc/pulse/default.pa, change this line:
   load-module module-udev-detect
to this
   load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

Then restart PulseAudio,
   pulseaudio -k