A Subjective View Of The Linux Audio Stack

English Open Chat
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Brodie Robertson just published a “to the point” youtube outlining what an abomination audio is on linux. He really tells it like it is. “All of these layers upon layers of software work, until they don’t. Then you can’t figure out why they didn’t”. He even throws in bluetooth. A really good commentary. Had me laughing. Reference is below:

I looked into forums on many of the popular distros and all have threads about cracking audio. This includes gentoo, arch, ubuntu, linux mint, fedora, and even linux questions. It is not just openSUSE, it is linux.

Linus should address audio if he wants to capture windows people. I neglected to check on cracking issues on windows.

tom kosvic

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What does Linus have to do with anything?

I don’t think he’s ever maintained the audio subsystems in the kernel, and to the best of my knowledge, he’s got exactly nothing to do with pipewire, pulseaudio, alsa, jack, or any other audio server for desktop linux.

Are you under some sort of delusion that Linus Torvalds is somehow responsible for every piece of software running on a linux kernel based operating system?

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I thought Linus set direction for efforts. Of course, he can’t do the coding. Maybe more of audio should be pulled into the kernel.

I only directed that comment toward Linus as I wouldn’t know how else to get audio under scrutiny.

tom kosvic

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PipeWire has largely surpassed PulseAudio as the default sound server for many mainstream Linux distributions.

For balance, here’s some up-to-date, fact-based information on the topic:

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I’m happy with Pipewire audio in Tumbleweed, and haven’t had the crackling problem described … but admit to not having compared audio to whatever is available in Mac or Windows.