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.

Problem:

I recently switched back to a desktop as my main computer, and was surprised to learn I couldn't use my speakers if my headphones were plugged in.

I don't use a desktop environment (just Sway), so I rely on pavucontrol as a GUI to control my audio.

I could use my headphones just fine while my speakers were plugged in, but when I switched to my speakers in pavucontrol's interface, they would not output audio. My headphones would stop playing (as expected), and pavucontrol's little "dancing bar" would indicate that the speaker's port was processing an audio signal (as expected), but no sound was actually being produced.

Solution:

The culprit ended up being something called "Auto-Mute" in ALSA. To disable auto-mute mode, you can either:

1. Run the command amixer sset "Auto-Mute" unmute in a terminal
2. Run the command alsamixer in a terminal
   2.1 Press F6 and select your sound card
   2.2 Ensure you're viewing playback settings by pressing F3
   2.3 Move the item selection over until you've selected auto-mute mode
   2.4 Press the down arrow key to switch it to "Disabled"

That fixed my issue.

For me, auto-mute mode stayed disabled after a reboot. You might need to run the command alsactl store to make the configuration persistent though. The Arch Linux Wiki article on ALSA has a "tips and tricks" section that goes into more detail:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture#Tips_and_tricks

I'm considering making the switch to pipewire, as my current setup involving a bridge between JACK and PulseAudio is growing frustrating. Even on a fresh boot, Spotify won't play until Pulse has been killed and restarted, and the same goes for games through Steam. All the while, Firefox audio works perfectly without doing so, and I can jump straight into recording with reaper without any issues from the get-go.

I've been reading through the Arch wiki to get a feel for what the process should be like, and it seems like it'll be relatively straightforward, but given that I do a lot of music recording on my computer, I don't want to experience a total breakage of my sound setup. I'm planning to make a full backup of my system before making any changes, so I can roll it back if need be, but if anybody has any experience with switching to pipewire on a production system, I'd be grateful to hear about any pitfalls or problems that you ran into which I should be aware of in advance!

By coding headphones I mean with active noise cancellation, to be focused on your work. However I'd like to have it more universal since i do play videogames in my freetime, so with a microphone would be best - Or should i have 2 sets for both activities?

Something below 100€ would be nice (naive yes, but I aint got much).

I looked at the Mixcder e7 on Amazon, which looked promising. Thoughts?