After countless failed attempts I came up with a simple yet working setup which can be implemented in about two minutes:

1. install pd-extended, jack-audio-connection-kit and fluidsynth
2. start JACK: jackd –realtime –silent -d alsa –midi-driver seq &
3. start FluidSynth:
   fluidsynth -l -i -s -a jack -o synth.sample-rate=48000 /usr/share/soundfonts/default.sf2 &
4. connect FluidSynth to ALSA:
   jack_connect fluidsynth:left alsa_pcm:playback_1
   jack_connect fluidsynth:right alsa_pcm:playback_2
5. pd -rt -jack -alsamidi -midioutdev 1

I first tried to not use JACK because I thought it would clash with PulseAudio. Problem with this approach: Pd does not support PulseAudio natively and neither does FluidSynth in F11 (upstream supports it, but that is another sad story). So it’s either PCM sound or midi, but not both at the same time

Fortunately, JACK turned out to work great – but for normal desktop usage, I am still very happy to have PulseAudio

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
127 cd
77 vi
40 svn
31 ls
28 rm
27 sudo
27 make
22 ssh
14 cp
9 mv

Looks like I still don’t really trust Nautilus to do some of the basic file management