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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

Pulseaudio has been painless for like a decade and a half. Yes, it has a rough start and was probably made default in many distros before it ought to, but it's fine.

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Pulse audio is ok until you plug or unplug things like earpieces and bluetooth speakers and then you want to do a videocall and random devices are the active ones. And then you find no obvious way to be able to record both input and output...

Lol because that never happens on any other OS. Plug my Mac into my dock, uses my DAC. Great. Unplug. Connect Bluetooth headphones. So far so good. Plug back into dock. Now it's... the built in audio? Huh?

I'm honestly surprised how often in Linux PA with WirePlumber just does the right thing most times, IME.

MacOS is the worst. I got to reconnect my bose bluetooth headset 3-4 times every time I have a zoom call because no sound.

On contrast, my linux laptop does not have any issue with the same headset and it gets connected instantly.

This is my Monday morning dance of Bluetooth. 99% of the time I'll join a call and everything is connected, line levels are set and yet... No audio. I know people complain about Pulse but MacOS is just as bad and, seemingly, getting worse.

I'll take a Linux distro any day of the week.

Perhaps the parent poster user AirPods. Those in contrast would seamlessly switch between your iPhone and MacBook . Apple more or less by planned design nowadays work seamlessly with their own products and their support for other devices is patchy .

> patchy

Negligent is a better word. Even opensource linux support for bluetooth is way better for the same devices.

Obviously Mac is terrible, as a Linux user I would clearly not use it as a baseline of how it should work.

The point is it's a difficult problem which nobody has solved perfectly. ALSA was certainly not better.

ALSA was 100% predictable. The amount of hidden state in PA and PW is insane.

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