Sound (oss, alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire...), bluetooth, WiFi are eternal problematic Linux paper cuts.

As always It is Not Linux Fault, but it is Linux Problem.

It's one of the reasons why I moved to OSX + Linux virtual machine. I get the best of both worlds. Plus, the hardware quality of a 128GB unified RAM MacBookPro M4 Max is way beyond anything else in the market.

▲

ndiddy 17 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the situation has flipped in the past few years. Since Pipewire came out, I haven't had any problems with audio on Linux and I can dial the latency down to single-digit ms. Meanwhile, on Mac audio has gotten far worse, especially since Tahoe. The latency is tens of ms and I get crackling and skipping when there's high CPU usage.

▲

josephg 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Audio is still broken pretty regularly in davinci resolve on Linux. Sometimes I need to restart the application to make audio work. And I can’t record sound within resolve at all.

It doesn’t help that they only officially support rocky Linux. I use mint. I assume there’s some magic pipewire / alsa / pulseaudio commands I can run that would glue everything together properly. But I can’t figure it out. It just seems so complicated.

▲

nine_k 13 hours ago | parent [-]

This sounds like a hardware / firmware problem specific to your particular sound chip / card.

Similarly, Bluetooth on my Thinkpad T14 is slightly wonky, and it sometimes fails to register a Bluetooth mouse on wake-up (I have to switch the mouse off and back on). This mouse registers fine on my other Linux machines. The logs show a report from a kernel driver saying that the BT chip behaved weirdly.

Binary-blob firmware, and physical hardware, do have bugs, and there's little an OS can do about that, Linux or otherwise. Macs have less hardware variety and higher prices, which makes their hardware errata lists shorter, but not empty.

▲

josephg 12 hours ago | parent [-]

That’s possible, but the hardware (a rodecaster pro 2 connected over usb) works just fine in other Linux apps. I can record audio in audacity. And I can play back audio in resolve. I just can’t record audio in resolve.

I think it’s a software issue in how resolve uses the Linux audio stack. But I have no idea how to get started debugging it. I’ve never had any problems with the same hardware in windows, or the same software (resolve) on macOS.

▲

prmoustache 11 hours ago | parent [-]

It is hard to blame Linux if only one proprietary app has sound issues.

FWIW I lost sound completely 3 times in the last 2 months on my works windows laptop and it would only come back after a reboot. I assumed it was a driver crash.

	▲	bigyabai 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yep, adding onto this, Bitwig's native Linux app has amazing Pipewire integration. It works like an ASIO plugged right into your desktop's audio, letting you attach channels to windows or apps and handle complex monitor/performance/mixing outputs. It depends on having a properly good implementation, which will come eventually for most apps.