I now have flashbacks to when I tried to get sound working on my Gentoo install 15 years ago. It seems that now everything has changed (wtf is pipewire) and still requires arcane knowledge to get everything working smoothly...
To be honest, I wouldn't say it requires arcane knowledge these days. When setting up both Arch and Gentoo, I did a bit of research, determined that Pipewire was probably the best for me (because it seems to be largely a superset of the other options), and installed it following the wiki instructions. That's it. I haven't had to configure things in any sort of detail, it just worked smoothly the first time without any config.
Realtek audio has gotten to a pretty good place on Linux. I've had several over the past few years, and they just work for the most part. Fedora, especially has been a wonderful out of the box experience for audio.
I must be the only unlucky one because my linux approved motherboard Intel DQ77MK with a Realtek ALC892 8-channel for audio kept switching between front and back panel (although nothing was plugged in on front) on Fedora 39 :( . It does work fine on windows.
Actually now that you mention it, I did have a similar problem on one particular motherboard. I don't attribute it to linux though so hadn't thought of it. It turned out to be a hardware issue (with the motherboard) though. The card kept resetting due to too low of input power. I had hoped a BIOS update would fix it, but it didn't. I have had a couple of built-in audio modules die and stop being seen by the kernel on old laptops.
Honestly I would just buy a USB interface. I got a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 and have been very happy with it.
Unfortunately no, I don't think I have the knowledge to try a hackintosh? Also not very sure if the system would be compatible with it. It is something to try eventually though.
I do have one, whatever HP figured was good enough for their "high-end" elitebooks. Worked perfectly on Arch without any fiddling. Even the mute leds on the keyboard work as expected.
I believe I do, though I'm not certain. I have whatever is built into my Asus motherboard, which seems like it is ultimately a Realtek chip. Not sure though.
Pipewire ends up being used to paper over Wayland deficiencies in some areas, thus why it's important for Wayland desktop ;)
By itself it's essentially grand unification of audio servers that actually works better and is way less... opinionated about the only true way some things works, which was a problem with pulseaudio at times.
Separation of responsibilities is something Wayland fails hard, by effectively hardcoding coexistence of significant part of display driver, windows management, simple things like windows decorations (which, thanks to Gnome's insistence, are by default only client-side, so your concerns invade internals of client apps!) etc.
Just don't use Gnome. KDE is fine with server side decorations and it's false that Wayland mandates client side ones. Wayland ≠ Gnome and Gnome itself indeed made a bunch of pretty questionable decisions.
But if anything it's X11 that tries to lump a ton of stuff together. Wayland is very minimalistic in comparison. That's why stuff like libinput and Pipewire are part of making a functional desktop.
Client Side Decorations are made effectively essential in core protocol (given that the core protocol doesn't even support existence of "windows"), server side decorations aren't, and some applications will display weirdly because of that.
More over, every "WM" in Wayland's case needs to implement the entire stack, even if it uses a common library for some of it.
And after similar length of development time, I'd say the result is still worse in many aspects than X11, and I say that as someone both using and praising a wayland-based compositor and lamenting that it pretty much locks me more than Windows used to
> and some applications will display weirdly because of that.
Well, if compositor supports server side decorations (and normal compositors should), I don't see how applications can behave weirdly becasue of that unless they are just buggy. It's up to applications to figure out if server side decorations work and use them if they do. I.e. even if it was a core feature, buggy applications could still behave incorrectly.
And I don't see Wayland being worse in many aspects, but on the contrary, see it being better in aspects which X11 didn't or can't address. I recently started using Wine Wayland for gaming and it's significantly better experience than using it with XWayland.
I use i3-wm. I know that there is Sway but it will require some effort to migrate. Also there are fresh reports that Wayland+Sway have problems with NVidia (even worse I have AMD + NVidia). I'd wait till it gets resolved or my current setup stops working.
The main issue is that X11 is an increasingly unmaintained case and all new development happens with Wayland anyway. So as long as you can deal with lack of support - I guess no need to move, but otherwise Wayland with KDE has been well usable for a while already.
It's different because this is windows hyper-v (or something related) crashing and bringing down your WSL session with it. A native Linux is far more stable.
PipeWire is drop-in replacement for pshshaudio with additional features (while preserving pshsh part sometimes). Only difference is 15 years ago half of the problems with sound were fixed by uninstalling pulseaudio as it was in early stages full of bugs but still pushed to many distros similar to systemd. Today's pipewire is as easy as uninstalling pulseaudio, installing pipewire, and most of the times it will continue working
To be fair. Pulseaudio in early days exposed tons of audio driver bugs that were since then fixed. Bluetooth audio was barely working back then. Now bluetooth works so well that it makes other operating systems look bad.
