I’ve had a bunch of audio issues crop up for me as well, after upgrading to Pop 24.04 and the new cosmic DE. I used to have keyboard shortcuts that would reliabily switch from headphones to speakers, but those are hit or miss now. And when they miss, I have to go all the way into into alsamixer and unmute things until it works again. Which begs the question, why can’t the normal audio settings UI do everything alsamixer can? Alsamixer isn’t complicated, by any stretch. Literally just lets you adjust the volume of all the things on a particular audio card, and mute/unmute.

I have been using Arch daily for 13+ years and I still don’t have a proper grasp on audio and Bluetooth…

Used raw ALSA, JACK, PulseAudio, and now Pipewire. I had major issues with all of them except ALSA.

I managed to disable devices like my webcam mic and PS5 mic, and even added a noise reduction filter to my real mic that shows up as it’s own device, but…

Only because the Arch wiki told me specifically how to do those things. Audio just luckily seems to work fine for the most part, currently. I used qpwgraph to play with wireplumber and it’s obviously very powerful, but I have no idea how it works :D

Bluetooth is a different story, it seems to work differently on every single device I’ve worked on…

Try to use a normal computer instead of trying to kick linux into a ATM.

exactly this

Never buy anything HP

Never buy an HP laptop for linux.

Same with any Apple Intel based iMac

Driver support is non-existent. Audio via the speakers worked but no volume control, Bluetooth, thunderbolt, mic etc didn’t work. Even the headphone socket didn’t work.

Shit even the gpu (AMD) didn’t work properly. Despite being a 5k panel resolution is stuck at 4k.

Sigh. Would have been a great Linux box if I could have gotten it to work

Edit

ty, noted.

My first experience with switching to Linux a few years ago was on an outdated, at the time, ~$400 HP laptop. Switching from Windows 10 to EndeavourOS, and everything just worked, including audio.

In fact, it still works great whenever I turn it on like a few times a year.

Many hardware companies have the same problem, they can output some decent hardware, but some other series are true lemons (especially for Linux/Unix, but for a lesser extent, for that other system as well). And beforehand, it’s not always easy to know which is which. It’s a common issue with laptop makers where the hardware is often more esoteric.

My elitebook 840 works fine on linux

hp victus16 is working fine with wireplumber. never buy hp because the anti customer practices, terrible build quality and supporting israel with hardware.

the bluetooth pipewire pulseaudio mix could be a bit better.

It’s gotten to the point that my bluetooth headphones will not connect to my laptop because I don’t currently have any media playing.

Load up a youtube video, the audio device springs into life, offers it up as pulseaudio source, who signals to bluez that there is a valid audio profile and suddenly everything connects.

From an efficiency standpoint, yes I get it. From a UX standpoint… please just let my earphones connect when I enable bluetooth from the get go

Had to change the quantum because I had audio “cracks”/bug sounds, cutting audio…

The dark days of fucking with xorg.conf files and ndiswrapper to get WiFi working are things I’m glad no longer exist.

The joke is they can’t hear them because their audio broke. You’re overthinking it. Lol.

Linux user for 20 years: in my days I has to compile X by hand if I wanted a graphic interface.

Linux users for 10 years: kinda worked, sometimes you had to install the same a couple of times with different configurations until one worked for you.

Linux user for 5 years: lmao, this easier than windows.

It’s mostly an old notion that just won’t die. Especially in the years after its initial release (2004) it was just a disastrous experience sometimes with cracking noises, misconfigured sinks (or outright missing), crashes and - if I still remember one of my first Linux experiences with Ubuntu 8.04 right - the sudden decision to repeat the current audio buffer at maximum volume.

Ever since I came back to Linux on Desktop around 2017 I didn’t had any bigger issues with Pulse either. Ever since Pipewire became the default stuff just works, no issues whatsoever.

Yeah I am also running linux for 20 years or so. Minor hiccups here and there, but sound has been solid generally.

You must have been blessed by the hardware gods. I had several scripts bound to hotkeys to fix various issues that would occur regularly and this was only 5 or so years ago. Volume would reset, wrong sink would get selected, it would crash, it would crackle, it had bad latency but most of the time it was fine.

Then you didn’t use your computer for much involving audio.

Same, I have it running on several different laptops/desktops, it’s probably a certain piece of hardware.

I’m sure it’s happening to people, just not everyone.

All i can say is, you have been a very lucky individual.

I 'member having to use a script to do software mixing of multiple audio streams in alsa, so I could listen to a music CD while playing WOW. Otherwise whichever thing started first would grab the audio device and the other thing couldn’t use it. This would’ve been back in like 2006-7.