Hacker News Reader

Comment by winrid | Hacker News Reader

Pop OS doesn't even properly support the front audio ports on my five year old motherboard. Unplugging my headphones requires restarting pipewire...

View on HN

Audio has always been a tough spot for Linux in my experience. That said, I also have problems with MacOS too so my problem might lie somewhere between my chair and keyboard.

I've never had audio problems on OSX. External monitors though, yeah...

The problem is the manufacturer of your motherboard doesn't provide and/or update their drivers for Linux.

I know to the end user this doesn't really make a difference, but everyone seems to blame Linux when there really isn't anything Linux devs can do about this kind of thing.

I can blame the distro. It worked on KDE Neon which also uses pipewire, by setting a "lock configuration" option in the audio settings. Gnome and the pulse config UI don't have such an option.

pop os is xorg by default, so wouldn't that be pulse audio you're dealing with?

xorg can use PipeWire, PulseAudio, JACK, and/or ALSA.

I just looked up what I was using, and it's apparently 'pulseaudio on pipewire'. You'll forgive the confusion. Still, I've not seen anything like what OP is describing. I'm sure he could hook to some sort of 'plug-in' event and auto restart it, though that does sound irritating.

Anyone got an updated version of this graphic?

https://i.stack.imgur.com/YjUTQ.png

It's surely worse in the 16 years since.

The updated version would look fairly similar, except most things would be routed to feed into either PulseAudio, ALSA or Jack. After that, it would be one big Dumb Funnel into PipeWire and out to your hardware.

Also a lot of that stuff is arguably obsolete. 90% of Linux apps will just dump audio to PulseAudio, which is neatly managed through PipeWire. A few professional apps use JACK2, which is also PW managed. Everything else will default to an ALSA sink wired through, you guessed it, PipeWire. It's like a boring and remarkably stable version of the Wayland situation.

There is no plug-in event, that's the problem. I can see the unplug event from the kernel logs, but it never gets an event when plugging it back in.

Nah, it uses a plugin that allows apps to interface with pipewire as if it was pulseaudio.

They didn't promise to support every hardware in the world. You don't even say which one you have.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com