Preface: I’m gonna be blunt and just say that my early attempts to even try and alternative operating system have never gone well, especially if I have to troubleshoot anything. And my first exposure was when the common troubleshooting step was, barbarically, recompile the kernel. Like, how was I supposed to do that from a command line? A lot of my animosity against the command line comes from the years of trying and failing Linux because literally the first step in any how to or online page is open up terminal. Ive come to hate those words with a passion.
The ONLY *nix based anything that hasn’t made me descend into being utterly miserable, has been MacOS. But since tim cook jumped on arm to spite the hackintosh movement, it’s forcing me to have to give a hard look at Linux… Again.
And in the intervening years, even using it in a live environment, usually a lot of things end up working well enough to perform a task. But the common thing I’ve noticed is, I never get sound. Ever.
Across any PC I have (or have used) regularly, my use case warrants a sound card. So over as many computers, I’ve a small variety of Audigy and X-Fi sound cards. In part to support surround sound and for handling eax code from legacy games. For whatever reason, everyone understands that DirectX and opengl tune fidelity for graphics, but it’s like theoretical calculus telling them that such APIs did the same thing for audio. And kotor without eax sounds as bad as star wars from the speaker of a 1977 CRT TV. I’ve never once been satisfied with Realtek onboard. Even less now with current motherboards downgrading to stereo output.
So the thing that continues to baffle me, is that in live environments, I’ll see the sound card detected. I might even get a DOS looking control panel to suggest I can operate it. But I can’t get any audio from my sound cards, to save my literal life. And when Daniel k’s final drivers even allow the thing to work correctly in windows 11? It’s hard not to wonder what in the hell is the problem here?
It might seem minor to the tone deaf, but it is a genuinely important thing if I’m to ever make Linux something worth actually trying to use daily.