[tialaramex]

Rather than force my preference on their IT hardware people while they're still dealing with knock-on effects from a pandemic, the laptop my current employer provided runs Windows because that's their default.

A few times per week, Windows will inform me "Your speakers aren't working" or "Your microphone isn't working". Notice that this is deliberately vague as to agency or cause even though of course they couldn't detect if the actual problem was that the physical microphone or speakers wasn't working. They know it isn't working because their driver fell over even though they don't admit that's the problem. As a result rebooting the computer usually fixes it.

Now, I happen to own a laptop by the same vendor, into which I can plug the exact same devices, and on that laptop these audio devices work reliably even under Windows (which is installed to run some games). But "it works on some hardware and not others" is exactly the sort of poor user experience Linux (and *BSD) audio gets dinged for...