I haven't had a sound issue since I unplugged the speakers

I did but that was mostly my own doing.

I want to like pipewire but configuration is a hell scape of configuration files that bare no resemblance to any I've dealt with before, and doesn't recognise my audio interface probably so I have to just fully stop all pw services and use jack for Ardour.

For me it's like:

• PulseAudio - Bluetooth Audio doesn't work
• PipeWire - Audio sometimes work, sometimes not. Reboot and figure it out.

Well, don't use both at the same time... Seriously though pipewire/pipewire-pulse have fixed all of the already pretty infrequent audio problems I've had

Lession learned the hard way. :/

It got a lot better in the last 5-10 years

But having functional audio in all applications was quite an archivement before that

I think it's just old tribal knowledge that people have turned into a meme at this point, just like people thinking all versions of Linux are so arcane and obtuse, you need to be a master programmer or hacker to be able to make it run without crashing. When I was first starting out with it, around 2009, I remember having somewhat regular issues with my sound and my wifi just randomly deciding I was unworthy of either sound or wireless internet access. That was across distros when I was initially checking things out, as well as across releases of the same distro once I (mostly) settled down.

These days, I can't remember the last time I had such problems that weren't either the result of a specific bug that was shortly fixed, or the fallout of something stupid I did myself while tinkering with something and not paying enough attention.

In the beginning there was oss, and then there was alsa. In the alsa days it was easy to get any given thing to work, but sometimes it was hard to make two separate things work at the same time.

Pulseaudio fixed this, but it took a long time, distros didn't start adopting it until 2008 or so, and back then it wasn't all that solid.

The meme makes no sense now that we have pipewire, but it'd have been fair between 1998 and 2009, depending on your configuration and usage case.

My primary issues on Linux have been wifi and GPU drivers. Wifi is fine these days, but trying to get actual 3D rendering to work still is a major headache.

Tbh? I just set up Bazzite on my PC and it was the first time i had (some) sound issues too. Mostly related to my pcie soundcard, but my Mainboard aux ports aren't working either. I think it's driver related, just to many different vendors.

my front audio ports don't work and i have no idea if it's a hardware or software issue so i just don't bother with them

edit: fixed it by changing front port audio mode from HD audio to ac97 in bios settings

Frfr

Sound has always worked for me UNLESS I'm using with some niche desktop.

I only really have sound card issues a few years ago with Civ I think. And from my memories of playing Civ 4 on windows, the Civ series has always had sound issues. Not had them for a few years no so ehhh

install tldr and run it on the command and it should give you a general idea what the command is doing.

Well, the song is from 1996. And Linux definitely was having trouble with sound then.

Lucky you! :)

For me, switching to Bluetooth half the time makess the audio go crackly and stuttering, which sometimes can be fixed by switching codec, sometimes not, and then after that happens my HDMI audio is screwed up too, even after turning Bluetooth off.

With steam games too, audio is the #1 most likely thing to be not working, or working improperly.

Good for you! I just solved a shared audio problem on a Pi 5 in the last week. If I was watching something in VLC then paused it and wanted to look at something on YouTube, I couldn't get any audio without killing VLC then later having to try to remember where I was up to.

Pipewire is amazing.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious but how often is midi used in modern days?

I feel like I got pretty lucky with my bitwig setup (on arch)? I selected PipeWire as the output driver and everything just works (no latency, midi is fine, other apps can still be heard). the only caveat is I have to fiddle a bit if I want the audio to be sent over screen sharing apps, which I think introduces a decent amount of latency. Maybe bitwig has invested in some tech the other DAWs don't have since it's commercial software and Linux support is one of their competitive advantages...

I only post peak content ya feel me 🚀🚀