I got super deep into synths and Linux audio years ago, and right around the same one Pipewire was starting to go mainstream. Shit just worked man!

If a sound plays but there's no audio server to receive it and convert it to an analog signal, does it make a sound?

there is some crackling with plenty of forum posts explaining how to fix these things going back to 2005 that are no longer relevant because the sound uses something with a different name now.

This is almost always because your pipewire buffers are too small (because of the defaults erring on the side of low latency) and so when the CPU is busy the buffers empty and you get some crackling. Use pw-top to see all of your devices and sources, next to the devices you should see a number in the QUANT column. Chances are that this is really low (or 1)

You can change your minimum buffer (pipewire calculates this by setting a 'quantum'), temporarily with :

pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.min-quantum 512

You can edit /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf and add a line under the [clocks] section:

default.clock.min-quantum = 512

Restart pipewire for the setting to take effect:

systemctl --user restart pipewire

(If your sound ever just dies for no reason, restarting pipewire is often all you need to do)

Use the temporary setting to increase the number. Lower number means a shorter buffer so, you get less audio latency in exchange for the risk of the buffer emptying. I don't have much problem with 256, but sometimes Proton adds some extra CPU overhead and I'll bump it up to 512.

Sometimes there's no sound because someone (looks at cat) ate the cables...

And I'm thinking, "what a mess were in! Hard to know where to begin."

had that problem with mint, randomly out of the blue a horrifyingly loud screech

I installed Mint on my relatively new HP laptop. The sound works about 33% of the time.

It depends. The old ALSA system was flaky from what I remember. Pipewire seems more stable, but can have issues with multiple devices but that might be more a bluetooth problem.

I've also had constant audio problems in windows, including every update shuffling all my audio devices and making a random one default and switching to the wrong device when connecting a new one.

I've had a few issues along the years. Linux user since 1997

Fedora 43, they break sound often by different means

Bluetooth. Like it works most of the time, but especially randomly the microphone does not work

15 years ago I would occasionally have audio issues. These days? Nah

I care.

I was shocked when sound started coming out of my portable monitor via HDMI when I first installed Pop… I don’t need sound, I just want my dedicated server to run!

Long ago, I had SoundBlaster Live! soundcard which was perfectly capable of mixing audio on hardware under ALSA, which in my mind meant that all of the userland sound daemon nonsense could go straight to hell for all I cared. Earlier, EsounD never worked right and no app supported it directly and the wrapper utility was a hassle when it even worked. Then came PulseAudio. I could get buuutttery smooth audio on direct ALSA or laggy barely working audio on Pulse. Absolute hog.

Sure, nowadays the situation is better. But back in the day, for me, the answer to "why isn't the sound working?" was usually "you tried to use anything but direct ALSA".

In fact, I actually prefer jamming on my Linux boxes because of pulseeffects/easyeffects and its really nice EQ, AutoGain and other plugins.

https://github.com/megankde/pulseeffects https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects