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Comment by mousepilot | Hacker News Reader

I use firefox but haven't had sound since they dropped alsa support. Occasionally I'll run palemoon to get sound but while I like the browser, its not totally stable.

Probably need to try chromium.

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I've had the same issue and finally bit the bullet and installed pulseaudio. I was semi-pleasantly surprised: it actually works most of the time on my computer these days.

I still have to mess with a billion things when I want to do anything more complicated than basic music playback, but for that it sorta works which is already pretty great by Linux audio standards.

I mean, the days are long gone when pulseaudio was buggy as hell. It is quite stable for years now, so much that now there is another unifying audio stack: pipewire. It will still require pulseaudio for most software (it provides a stub for it), and it is very early release but I’ve been using it with only occasional bugs.

I've had pretty terrible experiences with pulseaudio only a few years ago. As often on Linux I was probably unlucky with hardware support.

More generally I've always been frustrated with Linux audio because in my experience for basic audio playback OSS mostly Just Worked and every single API that came after it was buggier and harder to configure for the simple cases while still usually not good enough for professional use.

One exception was Jack which I like quite a lot, unfortunately it's also not natively supported by a lot of software, and that adds a lot of complications in my experience.

But again, I've been running pulse for about six months now and I haven't had any major issues, so credit where it's due.

The great thing about pipewire is that it provides a jack stub as well — you can use both pulseaudio and jack software side by side, and even pipe them to each other. I truly believe that once it stabilizes, linux will potentially be the best platform for audio production.

I'm developing a DAW, https://ossia.io and was recently very impressed by Pipewire : it's able to sustain 32 samples of latency on my hardware (multiface 2) while still working with Firefox, etc.

I must admit that I'm skeptical of yet another Linux sound API but I really hope that you're right, I'd really like to be able to use Linux for serious sound stuff and finally ditch Windows for that too.

I would even be willing to finally learn how to use Ardour correctly!

I'm really into music as a hobby and I don't want to mess up one of my few working computers. I do admit to using a youtube downloader some when I want to view a video.

Yeah I definitely see where you're coming from, unfortunately I just cowardly reboot on my Windows partition when I want to do "serious" audio work because Linux is just an exercise in frustration in my experience.

I run a minimal Gentoo system and it includes pulseaudio. It just works. No problems with it whatsoever. But on Ubuntu work machine it can be a pain. I don't know why this is.

Or you could install pipewire for a pulseaudio free experience, if that's what you're after (that's what I did).

Interesting, I might give this a shot, thanks!

does it work on ubuntu?

It should, however not sure about installation documentation. As always, the gentoo and arch wiki should get you there, even on ubuntu

You might try apulse:

https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse

This is what I use.

I do have an issue where Firefox hangs (requiring a kill -9) after the end of any WebRTC call, but I don't think that's related.

While not officially supported Firefox can still be built with ALSA support and with no pulseaudio requirement at buildtime or runtime. I suppose this might stop working at any point but it still works for me (currently on Firefox 88.0.1).

lol awesome, not only do I have the misfortune of no sound, people here want to rub it in with downvotes for mentioning it. thanks guys

We're just jealous you don't have to listen to ads :)

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