A Virtual Insanity indeed

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

Wrong OS, that's Windows.
Since Pipewire came around that means. Before… well… let's not talk about the collective Pulseaudio trauma.
- 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.
- Well, I have this weird issue when playing Fallout 76 through Steam on Ubuntu 24.04.
  If I use my Bluetooth headphones to play, journalctl shows periodic streams of pipewire errors (not near my laptop or I would paste the errors), and after one or two hours audio will become silent. I can recover stopping the game, reconnecting the headphones, and starting the game.
  It seems like a problem with the game, as other games, including the other Fallouts, work flawlessly. Still shouldn’t overwhelm pipewire IMO.
  TBH the last audio quirk I had on Linux was two years ago, it wouldn’t remember the volume of my headphones, and it was solved on its own after an update.
  
  if i use my bt headphones on winfows, it works only as hands-free, which has lower quality. even then it will fall behind, after 10 mins of listening there will be like a 10 sec delay. until it soon fails completely. will not connect at all on android. works without issues on all my linux machines.
- @Natanox @NONEdc when i installed windows 7 beta first time, it was impossible to make my realtek audio work with it at all, all drivers failed to start...
- When was that change? I feel like I had pulse audio issues years ago, but lately sound has mostly worked well. The only thing I was unable to do in Pop OS was switch between two different pairs of headphones.
- Which is fixed after just reinstalling the driver ...

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.
- Just use a decently recent distro or update to pipewire (and recent kernel). Pulseaudio is basically not where the good things are done anymore. It's been more than a year or 2 already that the sony phones have microphone working properly.
  It is a hard moving bunch of pieces that needed to be in place. The user libraries (pulseaudio or pipewire) the bluez stack and the kernel. For a while things were almost working on the first parts but there were problems on the kernel side then the kernel received patches and it finally was able to support the good audio codec.
  
  (I hate saying this, but) I'm on arch, and using pretty up-to-date versions of pulse and wireplumber, but no dice. I've tried the LTS kernel, still no dice. I think it's a regression that has somehow largely gone unnoticed, because I cannot find any bug reports about it, despite the headphones being quite popular
- 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
- once an update took away all of my sound devices in mint. had to roll back a few times and update a few packages at a time to find which freedesktop update broke it, then blacklisted it. that was the only time mint broke anything by itself.
  
  About a year in and a couple distro hops, the only time I've had something properly break on its own was when my Fedora Sway install forgot where to find font info.
  That was the last time I distrohopped, went to Endeavour and got quite cozy with the "fuck you do it yourself" mentality. If my stuff was gonna break, I should at least expect it and have plans
- I manually disabled HSP in pulseaudio. I'd rather use an external mic than subject myself to the atrocious audio quality of HSP.
  
  But it's a profile you can switch away from quite nicely using pavucontrol

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.
  
  but when the sound drivers get updated, it seems to make its own choices unless you disable it in the device manager
  
  It re-enable them on my work laptop for some reason.

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.
  
  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?
- Like, yeah. When you have everything working as it should, Linux runs smoothly and there are no more complications. But it's a real pain in the ass that initial configuration, especially for newbies like me a couple of years ago.
- Thank you for pointing that out! Exactly the same for me

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.

I've never had Linux sound issues I got no idea what u guys are always on about.
- Gotta distrohop more my dude. Reinstall your OS every week.
  
  they probably have a thinkpad or a system76, so of course it always works
  
  Nar I was on arch now on QubesOS am happy where I'm at
- I think a netbook I had in 2014 was the last time I had any audio problems.
  Has c/linuxmemes become c/excusestokeepusingwindows?
  
  Hell ya. I'm resurrecting a netbook right this moment. Pretty stoked about 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
  
  In the Japanese zodiac it is the year of the Linux desktop.

After Windows 10 drops support, the only proprietary system left will be my Mac which I use for music. I’ll be damned if I’m going to try and get Ableton Live running in Wine with low latency. I really wish it wasn’t like that’s though.
- Bitwig Studio is what finally allowed me to fully switch to Linux instead of keeping a Mac just for using Ableton Live.
  
  I'm messing with reaper right now and just got my daisychained firewire interface working. What sold you on bitwig? I'm interested, but I haven't looked into it yet.

i don't have sound on Windows, so Linux will bot be hard to accomodate to then

sndio(8) moment.
(With one HDMI-related exception, I have had no trouble with ALSA, JACK, OSS, PulseAudio, or Pipewire)

We all live underground

Excellent video.
- The effect is so well made, is mesmerizing.

@NONEdc looks like pipewire moment :)

MacBook moment
- "[word] moment" is such an annoying condescending phrase
  
  Moment moment.

I use Linux since 2007 and never had any issues regarding sound.
Seriously OP, get new material.
- Personally I have had plenty of issues, and find this meme very relatable.
- Meanwhile I had crackling audio after resume the last like 5 or so times I resumed my steam deck from sleep.
  Sorry this meme wasn't relevant to you, I guess?
- I landed on my current distro because it was the only one that mapped my speakers correctly. Several others just ignored the satellites or recognized them as a single speaker.
  On Manjaro it's a bit too quiet, but I can live with that fine.
  "It works on my computer" is a meme for a reason.
  
  Hmm I remember you being really angry at Linux in general and tagged you as such. Interesting here you are claiming to use Linux.
- Last time I used Linux (2 months ago maybe, bazzite) audio kept turning itself down to like 5% volume. Turning it up would instantly make it go down again if I let go of the volume slider
  
  Were you trying to set firefox's volume? I've encountered that when I forgot I set the volume of a youtube video from in the video player. For whatever reason Firefox implements that functionality by repeatedly overwriting it's own volume in pulseaudio/pipewire.
- Did you had back then a sound card with hardware mixing (Aureal Vortex <3)?
  Playing multiple audio streams was hard.