zlacker

Linux Desktop feeling extra good today, my sound often doesn't work but I don't have to deal with Microsoft nonsense.

>>pjfin1+(OP)
Pipewire has made all of my audio issues on Linux go away, at this point. Maybe it's my hardware (a high-end Dell Latitude that is Ubuntu certified) but it just f*cking works!

I'm on Arch, so I find I tend to have fewer issues than with Ubuntu (due to the latter always being on some ancient version). Seriously though when I switched from Pulse to Pipewire... I rebooted and I've never had any issues since!

Now, my biggest complaints are around i3 and X11. I get some flickering, and display management is a little painful. But those are largely self-imposed because of i3. I haven't tried switching to Wayland yet because it's good enough for me.

At this point, it's been years since I've used a Windows PC for work and... I'm so damn happy about it!

>>freeqa+94
If you like i3 but want to try Wayland pain-free - Sway uses i3's config file syntax, so you shouldn't have to change anything to try it out :)

>>pjfin1+(OP)
Frankly, sound has not been a problem for a long time now I think. Hell, the number of time windows killed the sound driver under usage for whatever reason it deemed useful, I actually would say nowadays Windows has the worst audio stack out of the 3 main OSs.

>>pjfin1+(OP)
My solution for audio on Linux was to buy a cheap USB sound adapter. They can often be found for under $10 and they just work.

>>kaba0+fo
^ The only sound issues I've been having these days is Windows 10 randomly deciding to not recognize my USB audio interface after waking from standby and acting as-if I don't have audio output, requiring me to physically plug it out and back in again :)

>>kaba0+fo
I always seem to have hardware that hits an edge case for Linux support.

Take my gpu's sound support. If I run sound through DisplayPort it runs 40% slower and an octave an a half lower pitch. Over HDMI it runs fine. Oddly, if I have an HDMI device attached sound over DisplayPort runs fine, until the HDMI connection or computer goes to sleep.

My solution ended up being to get a cheap usb sound adapter and skip the gpu audio. As the HDMI would only do 4k at 30hz and DP does 4k at 60hz.

>>freeqa+94
Switched to wayland today because nvidia drivers were killing performance when I plugged my 4k monitor into my laptop. Barely usable under X, fixed under wayland. Also wayland was able to independently scale the 4k monitor and the laptop monitor, which was nice. Found a couple niggles but so far what I need is working. (Using KDE.)

Worth a try.

>>pojntf+38
Caveat emptor: your normal apps might struggle still.

Some common things have wayland native replacements but it might be jarring.

Redshift (automatic Color temperature change) -> gammastep

Dunst (notifications) -> mako

Rofi (launcher) -> idk I just used kitty+fzf with some special options.

>>kaba0+fo
Tell that to my poor Legion 7i - Has on going onboard audio issues and very wonky iGPU/dGPU support.

>>freeqa+94
> Now, my biggest complaints are around i3 and X11. I get some flickering

I've started experiencing flickering in non-compositing window managers on Arch a few months ago (I mainly use Openbox, although I've tried dwm too) after some update. My solution was just to run `xcompmgr &` at the session startup.

>>dijit+pE
there is a wayland replacement for rofi called wofi. i didn't use rofi for anything particularly intensive so it was a drop in replacement for me

>>dijit+pE
wlsunset was a lot simpler for me to get to work compared to gammastep, which I thought had too steep a learning curve. I only need it for the yellow light, thought.

>>kaba0+fo
Yep. Bluetooth audio is probably best on Linux of the main 3 now that PipeWire exists (literally rock solid, I've never had a connection drop ever), but it's a toss-up when directly comparing CoreAudio to PipeWire. Once PW irons out it's latency issues, Linux may once again become the AV king! (well, maybe not the video portion with the state of Wayland these days...)

>>pjfin1+(OP)
Linux desktop is amazing these days. Heck, even my mom runs Ubuntu as of 4 months ago and is loving it. Now is time to recommend it. Zoom, teams, webex, Firefox, chrome, Thunderbird, darktable, Gimp, inkscape, blender, kdenlive, openvpn, signal, OBS, stellarium, vim, Python, libreoffice, etc all work perfectly on it. My USB logitec wireless headset was plug and play. Cameras all work fine. Audio is good. Plus lots of power feature capabilities to boot. Whats not to like?

>>dijit+pE
Dunst is native wayland since early 2021[1]. Instead of rofi, bemenu[2] is nice too.

[1] https://github.com/dunst-project/dunst/issues/264

[2] https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu

>>pojntf+38
I can’t do else but praise sway. Long lost perfect WM.

>>freeqa+94
If you're tired of waiting for next Ubuntu release and like living on the edge, you can switch to "Ubuntu+1", or always using the next release while it's being polished. Just replace "groovy" with the codename of your current Ubuntu release:

    sudo sed -i 's/groovy/devel/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

Then as usual:

    sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade

>>pjfin1+(OP)
I sorely wish this was the case. I have a W11 install now but always have an extra SSD for a Linux install (right now EndeavourOS with Cinnamon), but there's little things that keep me away from using it fulltime. The majority of them are gaming related, but there are other reasons. Last hiccup I encountered was trying to watch something with a friend over Discord, only to find out audio sharing is nonexistent. There seemed to be a way to pipe all audio through Pipewire mic input and have it work that way, but then I'd lose the noise threshold functionality. Ended up just booting into Windows anyway.

I'm really hoping with SteamOS, the Steam Deck, and the Linus daily challenge videos, the Linux desktop can get more love, but it's just not there for the majority of people yet.

>>helmho+MP
Oh interesting. I don’t know if I set anything specific but I usually just invoke it with my lat/long and it seems to work.

Will look at wlsunset too, maybe it’s a better UX. :)

>>freeqa+94
I actually contribute to PipeWire development in some small aspect (reporting bugs, debugging issues), and PipeWire is far from trouble-free. The recent 0.3.41 contained a bad commit which causes PulseAudio apps (RetroArch, QEMU, Orca) to infinitely buffer audio in xrun or something (fixed in git). And PipeWire has some issues switching profiles when you plug and unplug devices, and sometimes picks the wrong speaker/headphone port(?) when rebooting and then enabling a device, and the latency algorithm has issues as well (under default settings, it takes up to 0.6 seconds to hear certain libcanberra notification sounds). And it reuses IDs exposed to PulseAudio apps, which causes race conditions (eg. crashes, incorrect stream-to-app mappings in plasmashell) in PulseAudio apps. "Write" race conditions (eg. changing app volume) are unresolvable due to the Pulse protocol, though apps can be fixed to avoid "read" race conditions by ignoring stale data from IDs which have been deleted and recreated.

I still use PipeWire because routing app audio is cool (and not possible AFAIK on PulseAudio), and I can usually avoid the bugs well enough in practice. But it's not "just f*cking works" in many cases.

>>pjfin1+(OP)
What kind of hardware do you have? I haven't encountered problems with sound on Linux in years. And Pipewire is indeed good.

>>pjfin1+(OP)
Install pavucontrol, you won't regret it. Best pulseaudio gui, and makes problems easily fixable with one or two clicks.

It shows all active streams per application and lets you choose the correct input and output devices and streams, which makes mic and monitor devices easy to use.