Audio is the weakest link of the linux desktop experience

immaterial
2025-05-09T05:03:43Z

In the spirit of all the recent Linux posts, I feel like sharing my thoughts too. I've been using Fedora on my laptop for about ~1.5 years, and I've just began using Arch about 5 days ago. I moved to Arch because of all the Windows 11 shenanigans, and I really enjoyed the workflow of i3 on my laptop - the only thing I was unsure of was gaming. But I decided to take the dive anyway.

I installed Arch using the wiki, and it truly felt awesome being able to choose what exactly you want in your system and what you don't. After following the guide, I installed a tiling manger (hyprland), waybar, and a launcher (wofi). It was much easier than I expected (granted I had experience with Linux), after hearing all the Arch boogeyman stories. Though I did accidentally break my system by foolishly doing a `sudo pacman -Rcns ....'. But my configs were still all there and I just had to install everything back, which did not take long at all.

Everything just worked after installing, except for audio. My audio experience was bad, it was crackling and popping all the time. The Arch wiki didn't really have info on this problem, so I took to other avenues. I found a guide that said to change the 'quantums' for pipewire, to some values that I didn't really understand (nor want to tbh). But that fixed it for the most part!

My next problem was discord not picking up on audio for certain applications at all - I narrowed it down to apps that were using ALSA as the backend. So, some apps like Plexamp and Firefox wouldn't get picked up by discord. I changed the backend of Firefox to ALSA due to a longstanding bug which resets the per-app volume level of Firefox every now and then. Setting the backend to ALSA is a workaround, but I didn't know it'd prevent discord from picking up audio. I can't find a solution except to revert to the normal backend - if anyone knows a fix the tech support would be welcome haha

Also the different backends for audio (pipewire/pulseaudio/alsa) make it confusing at times. To me, this is a big hurdle to overcome before the "year of the linux desktop" ever becomes reality - I've had so many issues, even on my laptop. Other than that, the experience is really quite fantastic, the modularity and customization is nuts. I've had quite a bunch of fun tailoring my experience and creating scripts to make the system do exactly what I want.

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