[mananaysiempre]

That... Shouldn’t be terribly difficult? Though I don’t believe UEFI has sound drivers (you’ll have problems writing one yourself because even frickin’ sound-codec chips have NDA-only datasheets these days), and the stupidest thing is that the “graphics output protocol” doesn’t indicate vsync so you can’t do tear-free blitting, which is literally worse than VGA.

[DiabloD3]

Most support Intel HDA.

The problem is that people don't use onboard audio anymore (because its incredibly and audibly noisy). They use USB or Bluetooth.

Bluetooth absolutely isn't standardized and is a mess, and USB miiiiiiight be okay if you limit to a subset of EHCI and USB Audio Class 1.0 devices.

At this point, its easier to just use Linux and run your game as pid 1.

[ahartmetz]

Regarding onboard audio:

About 10 years ago, it became "common knowledge" about mainboards that onboard sound has become good enough for almost anybody. It has never been true for me, maybe because my recent mainboards have been lower middle class (AMD B350 / B650) largely chosen for good CPU power converters.

Because my two (PC) laptops since 2020 have both had really damn good headphone outputs, I can believe that some good / expensive mainboards have it, too. It's not exotic technology anymore. Meanwhile, my desktop PC has a 20+ years old M-Audio prosumer card that also sounds great. (Now rigged with a PCIe -> PCI converter card off AliExpress)

[DiabloD3]

This common knowledge is still incorrect.

Good news, though, there are a lot of inexpensive good external DACs out there. Over the past decade, an entire industry grew up to fix this problem.

[ahartmetz]

Between these DACs and / or Chi-Fi class D amps (some of them with built-in DACs), nowadays you can spend 90% of the Hi-Fi budget on speakers. It's incredible how good electronics you can get for how cheap these days.

[anthk]

Bluetooth sucks against the raw codec of a soundcard. If you want lossy music, that's it.

But given autotune trends and how genz-ers grew up with shitty early smartphone loudspeakers and not much better BT ones they aren't used to proper music and their tastes are rot forever.

[DiabloD3]

I refuse to use Bluetooth, too.

But, unfortunately, people keep buying that trash. We're kinda forced to support their mistakes.

[ronsor]

You can strip down Linux significantly as well: no multi-user, no extra syscalls, no FS support beyond initramfs/tmpfs, etc.