1.) would jack
be "scalable" enough to run xmms and kolf with
sound enabled at the same time on a Pentium1/166MHz as arts does
with arts for my 9 year old Daughter ?
ALSA's builtin dmix can do that.
Given that the two most popular 'KDE supporter' Linux distributions
(SUSE and Mandrake) also install ALSA by default, maybe dmix rather
than artsd support is what we should be lobbying the KDE developers
for.
As pointed out already, artsd is no use with non-KDE applications, of
which at least one is likely to be running on a KDE desktop at any
one time.
Cheers
Daniel