Hacker News Reader

Comment by matkoniecz | Hacker News Reader

"you will never have working audio" - what you mean by that? Some specific software not working on Linux or complete lack of audio?

I run into some cases of software refusing to run on Linux (though curiously, I switched to Linux due to software refusing to work on Windows).

I run into wifi/printer issues (but both on Linux and Windows) and I managed Linux to Work, while Windows remained resistant to debugging and kept failing with contentless errors.

View on HN

One example I found recently is bluetooth headsets: On Windows it by defaults uses the high quality audio output profile, but switches to "headset" profile when an app requires a microphone and picks the headset. On Linux (Ubuntu to be precise) you have to manually pick the profile somewhere deep in Pulse, making the usage of the microphone pretty hard as you first have to figure out how to change it and secondly need to manually change it every time you get into and out of a call. I quickly gave up and now use a separate mic.

Its all kind of small things like this that make Linux grind just a little bit more for me than Windows, not saying Windows doesn't have its issues though, just a lot less.

Bluetooth audio in Linux is strangely good in a point: LDAC support. Windows/macOS doesn't support LDAC but (GNU/)Linux has ported LDAC support from Android.

With the advent of more people working at home, with a greater variety of headphone/headset devices it's even more of a hassle to use linux for daily work tasks. Not that you can't, obviously, but if you're not a developer or sysadmin-inclined, it's a mess trying to get a linux desktop lashed together.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com