I’m new to Linux and I was troubleshooting some audio issues and yeah I ended up uninstalling GNOME. Oops.
I once tried to uninstall every package to do with Wine but
sudo apt remove wine*wrecked the system past the point a high schooler could recover it
I lose sound so much more in Windows. I love it when it thinks an HDMI monitor is the main sound even though I never selected it and have to change it back a few times a year. (work computer)
You can fix this issue if you right-click the sound icon down in the corner of your screen and choose “sounds” from the list. Then in the first tab in the window that opens up you can find and disable the monitor as a sound device from being used and defaulted to at random on startup.
It re-enable them on my work laptop for some reason.
but when the sound drivers get updated, it seems to make its own choices unless you disable it in the device manager
Anecdotally, I’ve had way more audio issues in Windows than I’ve had in Linux.
Linux audio setups don’t always work out-of-the-box, and sometimes require a bit more configuration, but once you get them set up the way you like, they stay that way.
Windows audio configuration is flaky as hell. It’s constantly changing with updates, and I’ve had so many issues with drivers just silently failing. It seems to have the most trouble with discrete sound cards and USB audio interfaces. I can’t tell you how many Discord and Teams calls I’ve had in Windows where the first 5 minutes is re-configuring audio settings that didn’t stick. This is basically a non-issue in my Linux setups.
macOS audio is probably the best combination of easy to configure and it works consistently. The biggest downside is that you need a lot of 3rd party software to do anything more advanced than setting a single device and volume for the entire system.
Note: I primarily use pipewire now. I used to have more problems back when I used pulseaudio.
I have no idea why Pulse is so bad. During my last foray into Linux, I created a shortcut for killing and restarting Pulse and pinned it to the dock. I also replaced all my game shortcuts with scripts that reinitialized pulse, then ran the game, then reinitialized pulse again when the game was closed.
Ah, yes, the notorious
unfuck-audio.shscript. It’s like a rite of passage for linux users.I hate to be this guy, but after being mad that Pop OS now defaults to pipewire, it’s pretty fucking nice. It’s stable and a little annoying to configure, but it works so much better than pulse. Perhaps consider switching?
My current distro also uses pipewire and I’ve had no issues. I haven’t even needed to configure anything. I originally went to Linux when my XP install died and I couldn’t afford a Win7 license. I was happy enough with Win10 to migrate to that when it came out, and now that Microsoft is forcing people onto Win11 I’m back to Linux as my primary. Pipewire and Proton really took Linux from ‘good enough’ to ‘actually quite nice’.
i currently have something similar with video output: if i turn off my monitor and turn it back on too fast (or if i disconnect/reconnect it), now there is no more picture, and i have to reboot per remote shell to get it back.
oh well, at least there’s an open issue in some github about it, so it will be fixed sometime in the future.
Pulseaudio. For a long time my Sony headphones had no working mic. Then one magical update, I had full HSP as well as A2DP sink. It was amazing - I could take teams calls without having to change headsets!
Then one not-so magical update, poof it just went. I tried to scour the bug list in pulseaudio to find anyone who had experienced the same but found the bugtracker impossible to navigate without a login account.
So now I wait, and update, and pray for an update that restores this feature.
The answer is PipeWire. It’s a drop-in replacement for PulseAudio that works.
I think that’s just branding. I use the pipewire / wireplumber stack for a while and have not noticed any big gains over vanilla pulse
FYI, Pulse and Pipewire are two different audio servers, not just branding.
Pipewire should be more like JACK, but easier to use like PulseAudio. That was the whole point of it.
I heard that he wrote that song after visiting an underground mall in Japan. How gnarly was that mall, that it made Jamaroquai write a song about technology being fucked up?
Japan is in the 23th century already
In tech: maybe
Other than that it often feels like 1950s America
Even in tech, there are things that probably haven’t changed in the past 25 years
True, but I give them the fax machines in their public offices and floppy disks on trains because the service works. I’d rather have it this way than switching everything to the newest ipads and breaking the service on the way.
True, it’s a lot of paperwork and not the most efficient, but I can trust that it will work
I’ve never had Linux sound issues I got no idea what u guys are always on about.
Does your distro use pipewire by any chance? That would explain the lack of issues.
Wrong OS, that’s Windows.
Since Pipewire came around that means. Before… well… let’s not talk about the collective Pulseaudio trauma.
Which is fixed after just reinstalling the driver …
Oh god, I had such weird issues with audio on my manjaro desktop with pulseaudio … Never touched anything related to sound on that system again, out of fear everything would break down again. I didn’t switch to pipewire until years later.
