It’s not being used as an indicator of user friendliness (that’d be the atrocious time I had setting up my Nvidia GPU and HDR monitors). It’s specifically an anecdote replying to the previous guy’s (accurate) comment regarding how finicky old implementations of audio on Linux used to be.
But also, in case you’re wondering, that setup worked first time on Windows with no additional work beyond the drivers installed by Asus itself. Do I like, or even tolerate, ASUS’s weird driver manager? Nope, frickin’ hate it, would switch to Linux to avoid it all things being equal. But one thing worked first time, the other needed five different distros before one randomly got it right for no discernible reason.
I was thinking not only about the finicky drivers, but also the different audio backends, like ALSA and OSS, Pulse would have just come out at the time, so it was definitely getting better, but it was fresh off the presses back then, so it wasn’t good enough yet either. Nowadays, Pulse works pretty well, pipewire works pretty well, things more or less just work, Bluetooth can be a little weird, but usually you just need to change the settings on pulse/pipewire to your preference.
I’ve genuinely had problems with multi-speaker configs this year on multiple distros and very little guidance on how to troubleshoot it. But you’re not wrong.
It’s not being used as an indicator of user friendliness (that’d be the atrocious time I had setting up my Nvidia GPU and HDR monitors). It’s specifically an anecdote replying to the previous guy’s (accurate) comment regarding how finicky old implementations of audio on Linux used to be.
But also, in case you’re wondering, that setup worked first time on Windows with no additional work beyond the drivers installed by Asus itself. Do I like, or even tolerate, ASUS’s weird driver manager? Nope, frickin’ hate it, would switch to Linux to avoid it all things being equal. But one thing worked first time, the other needed five different distros before one randomly got it right for no discernible reason.
I was thinking not only about the finicky drivers, but also the different audio backends, like ALSA and OSS, Pulse would have just come out at the time, so it was definitely getting better, but it was fresh off the presses back then, so it wasn’t good enough yet either. Nowadays, Pulse works pretty well, pipewire works pretty well, things more or less just work, Bluetooth can be a little weird, but usually you just need to change the settings on pulse/pipewire to your preference.
I’ve genuinely had problems with multi-speaker configs this year on multiple distros and very little guidance on how to troubleshoot it. But you’re not wrong.