Always want to try Linux as main OS, but troubles with audio stopped me. Have heard about new shiny pipewire, that solves all the linux audio mess.

It's pretty easy to setup, but audio with pipewire has crackled sometimes when recording. Spent half a day to fix it by following random guides and docs...

Now uninstall pipe and install jack. Just works fine: select device, change sample rate and you are ready without any fuckinf annoying crackles and tinkering with a lot of config options

that's unfortunate. Audio has been working for me for >7 years, w/o any problems

@netikras same :) (except that one time i uninstalled that driver and couldn't find its name, but thats on me)

Yeah PipeWire has been working great for me, but have some issues when my mic is at 100% gain. Have to lower it to like 50% not to clip

This is the exact issue I've been seeing since yesterday when I converted my laptop into dual boot. Audio is way worse than windows. IDK why.

@zlice maybe it's luck. Over those years I've had over a dozen of linux installs on at least 8 different computers. Audio worked OOTB on all of them.

@zlice

@netikras

I think it's super hardware sensitive. I had been running linux on a bunch of machines as well now, and there's only one MSI laptop that had issues with audio on Ubuntu 18.04. Never had any problems afterwards. Everything works, HDMI works, Bluetooth headphones work, 3.5 Jack works, Speakers work, I can mute/boost both at app level or system level. And I'm still just running Alsa and Pulse on a pretty standard Kubuntu install.

Audio is much better than it used to be, but I recon there's still a wild hardware incompatibility here and there with manufacturers

Alsa already worked fine (18 years ago) but not to much control. Could be a bit messy for mixing and programs fighting for control. Pulse resolved that, could even route the two mic/line inputs on my audio interface as stereo output. That didn't work on Windows. The volume control app (pavucontrol) did use a lot of cpu when open, no issues with sound.

Only thing I had real issues with was using USB audio interface on a raspberry PI. It's whole rate was just to high for the bus combined with disk reads/ethernet. Took me a while to figure out it was a hardware design issue of the pi (in combination probably with the interface driver)

I feel like all software related to audio is a dice roll whether it'll work for you or not

Windows is somewhat reliable but you can't configure a thing and it keeps setting my output device to my monitor for no god damn reason

The audio solutions for Linux seem very flexible and configurable but they're also a piece of software that I never want to interact with beyond setting my volume

Its always about that one thing that just worked before. But honestly for me now there are sooo many reasons why i will never go back. Including the long boot time and needing to wait even when logged in. Seriously i couldnt open an app instanly. Prob all the spyware was loading first :)

That seems to have been fixed forever and ago especially with new hardware markets seeming to have been dominated by specific vendors