Hacker News Reader

Comment by Verdex | Hacker News Reader

My gaming PC isn't compatible with windows 11, so it was the first to get upgraded to Linux. Immediate and significant improvement in experience.

Windows kept logging down the system trying to download a dozen different language versions of word (for which I didn't have a licence and didn't want regardless). Steam kept going into a crash restart cycle. Virus scanner was ... being difficult.

Everything just works on Linux except some games on proton have some sound issues that I still need to work out.

View on HN

>> some sound issues

Is this 1998? Linux is forever having sound issues. Why is sound so hard?

In some games I get a crackle in the audio which I don't get through any native application, nor some games run with proton. I don't know if that's what he means, but it hasn't bothered me enough to figure it out. I use bluetooth headphones anyway, I'm relatively insensitive to audio fidelity.

If you run pw-top, you might see errors accumulating. This is usually due to an underrun from the game requesting an audio quantum that’s too low.

The fix is:

    mkdir -p ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d && echo "context.properties = {default.clock.min-quantum = 1024}" | tee ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/pipewire.conf

Basically, just force the quantum to be higher. Often it defaults to 64, which is around 1ms.

To be fair, you can have sound issues on windows too. It's not usually on issue on linux anymore either though.

Linux sound is fine at least for me. The problem is running Windows games in proton. Sound will suddenly stop, then come back delayed. Apparently a known issue on some systems.

Sound (oss, alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire...), bluetooth, WiFi are eternal problematic Linux paper cuts.

As always It is Not Linux Fault, but it is Linux Problem.

It's one of the reasons why I moved to OSX + Linux virtual machine. I get the best of both worlds. Plus, the hardware quality of a 128GB unified RAM MacBookPro M4 Max is way beyond anything else in the market.

I think the situation has flipped in the past few years. Since Pipewire came out, I haven't had any problems with audio on Linux and I can dial the latency down to single-digit ms. Meanwhile, on Mac audio has gotten far worse, especially since Tahoe. The latency is tens of ms and I get crackling and skipping when there's high CPU usage.

Audio is still broken pretty regularly in davinci resolve on Linux. Sometimes I need to restart the application to make audio work. And I can’t record sound within resolve at all.

It doesn’t help that they only officially support rocky Linux. I use mint. I assume there’s some magic pipewire / alsa / pulseaudio commands I can run that would glue everything together properly. But I can’t figure it out. It just seems so complicated.

This sounds like a hardware / firmware problem specific to your particular sound chip / card.

Similarly, Bluetooth on my Thinkpad T14 is slightly wonky, and it sometimes fails to register a Bluetooth mouse on wake-up (I have to switch the mouse off and back on). This mouse registers fine on my other Linux machines. The logs show a report from a kernel driver saying that the BT chip behaved weirdly.

Binary-blob firmware, and physical hardware, do have bugs, and there's little an OS can do about that, Linux or otherwise. Macs have less hardware variety and higher prices, which makes their hardware errata lists shorter, but not empty.

That’s possible, but the hardware (a rodecaster pro 2 connected over usb) works just fine in other Linux apps. I can record audio in audacity. And I can play back audio in resolve. I just can’t record audio in resolve.

I think it’s a software issue in how resolve uses the Linux audio stack. But I have no idea how to get started debugging it. I’ve never had any problems with the same hardware in windows, or the same software (resolve) on macOS.

It is hard to blame Linux if only one proprietary app has sound issues.

FWIW I lost sound completely 3 times in the last 2 months on my works windows laptop and it would only come back after a reboot. I assumed it was a driver crash.

Yep, adding onto this, Bitwig's native Linux app has amazing Pipewire integration. It works like an ASIO plugged right into your desktop's audio, letting you attach channels to windows or apps and handle complex monitor/performance/mixing outputs.

It depends on having a properly good implementation, which will come eventually for most apps.

Pipewire + lowlatency kernel fixes 99% sound issues

The problem is games over Wine/Proton doing weird things with the sound. Not the sound itself on modern Linux. Heck, I have less issues using audio stuff, or just changing the audio volume on Linux than on the crappy Windows.

> Why is sound so hard?

Because they keep "updating" it every couple of years. Though, "updating" in latest years, meant just adding additional layers on top of ALSA. SW design and engineering is hard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com