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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

The audio stack on Unix is easily in my top three pet peeves of the desktop environment. It feels like a huge case of too many cooks in the kitchen.

To this day, every time I upgrade my distro to a major revision I just can't assume the audio will keep working. Latest upgrade of Ubuntu, and I had to download alsamixer to get audio coming from my headphones again on Zoom meetings. Both the output selector in Zoom and the selector in Settings just... Stopped working. I could select the headphone output, and nothing changed.

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> The audio stack on Unix is easily in my top three pet peeves of the desktop environment. It feels like a huge case of too many cooks in the kitchen.

This is also my opinion, which is why I was surprised by the conclusion of the article. Money quote:

> The audio stack is fragmented on all operating systems because the problem is a large one. [...] The stack of commercial operating systems are not actually better or simpler. [...] Linux is the platform of choice for audio and acoustic research and was chosen by the CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics).

I guess my gripe is this disconnect between "desktop audio" and "pro audio". I have my PulseAudio set up the way I want it, and that's what I need 99% of the time, but I would like to use Ardour when I want to record a podcast, but whenever I read the Arch wiki about how to have PulseAudio and JACK coexist, it looks like a huge mess that I don't want to deal with. Here's hoping PipeWire really shapes up to be my savior one day.

The simplest way to do this now is to install pulseaudio-module-jack, that works pretty seamlessly in my experience.

Without this one simple module, PulseAudio would have been entirely eradicated from my life long ago. Now its just hanging around in the background while JACK does all the work.

> whenever I read the Arch wiki about how to have PulseAudio and JACK coexist,

https://github.com/brummer10/pajackconnect

start jack, start pulseaudio, run pajackconnect, done

Keyboard configuration of the login screen is another favourite of mine.

I'm personally partial to the GPU drivers.

Every now and then I get booted to cli on startup and I have to reinstall the Nvidia drivers to get sddm to launch properly.

Also every time I reboot it's completely random if the login screen will be at 1080p or 4k (I have a 4k monitor).

Maybe it's because I've got an Nvidia card.

I'm scared to update because I know I'll have to spend hours fixing the audio and video, and whatever else again.

In the case of nvidia drivers, at least there is the (valid) excuse that the hardware vendor is purposefully hostile to linux. But failings of sound and localization are entirely of linux making.

Yeah, I know people “need” Nvidia but, I really wish people with the know-how would put some serious effort into making the deep learning stacks work well and easily on AMD cards: they may not be as fast, but AMD’s strategy is much more linux-friendly and it’d be nice for the FL/OSS community to work to make a Vega or Navi card easy to use for GPGPU.

Expending considerable effort to support each Linux release with Nvidia drivers is the opposite of being "purposefully hostile to Linux".

They shouldn't need to "support" any Linux "release" if they only published the specifications for their hardware like a civilized hardware vendor.

Like AMD, that only supports GL 3.3 on a GL 4.1 capable card?

For a few ten year old card models. Everything before and after supports whatever the HW can. Maybe it's time you let go of this grudge.

Maybe it is time to stop advocating open source drivers as something that benefits everyone.

Apparently old models get dropped just as with binary blobs, or maybe not, given that the Windows drivers work today just as 10 years ago with GL 4.1 and DX 11.

Well your hardware is from a time when AMD was still primarily pursuing the binary fglrx driver - if your card had an open source driver back then it would still work. What got dropped is the proprietary driver, not functionality from the open source driver. And with r600g being open source, people (mainly Red Hat's Dave Airlie) have been adding to it - in particular, there is OpenGL 4 support for some cards now, just not for all yet.

Just because you are unhappy that your card was too old to be included in the current open source driver does not mean you have to spread FUD about it.

It is not FUD, rather the proof that having open source drivers don't translate to support.

If anything, it helped my decision to focus on Apple, Microsoft and Google platforms, and let go of "Year of Linux Desktop" mantra.

FTR: I use Archlinux and the Archlinux maintainers take care of all of this for me.

The only surviving netbook where I still bother to run Linux bare metal now decided to start enabling the keypad overlay (for whatever reason), which naturally breaks the password entry.

So now I have to go through Fn+NumLock dance every time I bother to use the netbook.

Since the last update PulseAudio keeps randomly switching streams from my analog output (which I connected my headset to for video calls) to my USB amplifier that drives my speakers (for listening to music).

This used to work perfect, now I always have to keep pavucontrol open when I'm in a conference so I can quickly switch the streams back.

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