[lazyier]

I estimate about 75% chance it's a configuration problem on his end.

The "I hate Pulse Audio and especially Lennart" crowd tends to want to either go back to "Alsa" or tried at some point to install the old OSS drivers and then gave up.

This means trying to configure dmix to work properly, trying to configure your audio outputs with tools like 'alsamixer' and things of that nature.

This is about a 100% guaranteed approach to screwing up audio in Linux. For years it is what unsuspecting newbies were told by "really smart people" on the internet when faced when any sort of audio issue and all it really does is ensure that their OS audio is going to turn into a dumpster fire.

The only way to fix it is to aggressively find your "custom" audio settings for every application, find all the alsa configuration files and delete them. And then find out where your distribution saves your alsa mixer settings between reboots and link them to /dev/null and reboot.

Audio settings of this nature are very persistent and nothing Pulseaudio or Pipewire can do to help you fix it.

[pengaru]

As someone using strictly alsa/dmix/alsamixer for decades now, I'm surprised to learn my OS audio is a dumpster fire.

To me it's a low-feature deterministic stack that rarely does what I don't want it to.

But I haven't introduced a bunch of fuel for the fire like bluetooth audio devices either... to each their own.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> The "I hate Pulse Audio and especially Lennart" crowd tends to want to either go back to "Alsa" or tried at some point to install the old OSS drivers and then gave up.

Well, yeah, since when pulse showed up and started breaking people's audio it effectively replaced alsa (even though they kind of operate at different layers). So if you didn't like that, of course the solution was to rip out Poettering's bugfest and revert to alsa. Thankfully at some point pulse stabilized a lot and in my experience tends to just work out of the box these days, but people tend to have their habits set by the early versions that were pushed out before they were ready.