for people as confused as I am, "Linux Audio" here refers to some sort of libre software group centered around audio applications on linux, not the actual audio stack of linux systems.
Yes, if this has said 'Linux Audio Consortium' it would have been a lot clearer. The described behavior sounds appalling, but the author is also not doing himself any favors in how he explains it.
I have never heard of NON before and beginning the story in media res while omitting any details of what the 3 antagonists asked him to do with his project makes the whole thing confusing. Until he got to talking about the LAD mailing list, which I am somewhat familiar with, I thought it was some sort of scam post.
As a linguistic point, I note that title case is unhelpful in this instance: “Linux Audio Is Dead” here on HN, “Linux Audio is Dead” in the original article, both are ambiguous. Sentence case, which is quite rapidly supplanting title case in most English locales, would have made it clearer, though still subtle: “Linux Audio is dead”.
Good point. My first language is German and I've never been able able to warm up to English title case. There's no such thing in German that I'm aware of.
FWIW the actual audio stack of linux systems is pretty broken too. Ever try to use some pretty standard bluetooth headsets with Linux? Never works. I always had to delete and re-pair for every conference call. And you have to go through this nonsense
if you want your audio to sound better than a snake in a swimming pool, and nobody will ever tell you that. On iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, bluetooth headsets pretty much "just work".
I'm a Linux fan and all my computers run Linux but Bluetooth audio IS broken.
What's the limitation? My wild-ass guess would be that rx and tx have to be on the same radio frequency, so you can't do full duplex without packet collisions.
Some sort of hardware limitation preventing two protocols(profiles) going through CODEC or something. “Back/return channel” features are emerging to encapsulate profile over profile so it might change in the future
It's that the handset profile which allows two way audio but only with crappy phone style codecs is different from the audio profile that only has one direction for an audio stream but has decent audio quality.
What I don't get is that why the H/W companies don't just solve this by including a 2nd Bluetooth chip. Give up on running duplex, run high quality audio out to the headphones, and the mic as a separate device using whatever is best there.
And beats (at least my studio 3s) on Mac/iOS/Android.
If your going to do wireless on windows, either get a separate mic, use a corded headset, or a headset with a USB-wireless adapter unless you want it sounding like a tin can.
You could just stuff two headsets into one same headphone, sharing only speaker output and power. Battery life isn’t a problem, a random BL-5C from parts bin should work just fine.
I have a new laptop running Arch, and Bluetooth headphones which nominally can act as a headset as well, but I actively disabled that functionality under Windows, because if something tried to use the atrocious-quality headset microphone, the high-quality headphones output would silently (literally!) not work, and only the low-quality headset audio output would work.
The headset modes haven’t appeared under Linux at all, which happens to suit me just fine, so I haven’t investigated the lack. A couple of times I’ve had issues with connecting at the BlueZ level, but putting the laptop to sleep and waking it up again has resolved it. (Just restarting bluetoothd doesn’t help.)
I was running PulseAudio for a few weeks, then I switched to PipeWire. I no longer get the Bluetooth indicator on it in waybar, but other than that the switch was fairly uneventful. One point is an improvement: it now seems to remember which devices I like to use, so that when I plug in my Yeti microphone it doesn’t switch audio output to it (it has a 3.5mm monitor port and can feed audio from the computer through that too), which it had always done under PulseAudio and I hadn’t yet gone to the trouble of figuring out how to stop it from doing that. One point in the Bluetooth device handling is potentially a slight regression: when silence should be being fed through the connection, I observe extremely quiet whine which I didn’t under PulseAudio. Not sure what’s at fault there.
> On iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, bluetooth headsets pretty much "just work".
I wouldn't go that far. On windows my headset shows up as two cryptically named devices, and using the wrong one or touching microphone input destroys the audio quality.
I can second this. I have a couple different pairs of Bluetooth headsets with microphones that work flawlessly on android, iOS, and Mac.
Windows 10 gets decent audio quality until you try to engage the microphone at which point it switches to a different audio driver with the quality of bad cellular phone call. It sees the headphones AND a generic “Bluetooth headset”. I’ve seen the same behaviour across Sony, Beats, and AirPods.
FWIW, my headset works great out of the box, defaults to stereo, and the kde audio settings let's me pick headset to switch it to crappy audio, but mic mode for calls. No need to disconnect.
NixOS 21.05; with last year's release, it did default to headset mode, and the audio profile switching was hidden behind an "advanced" button, so things are improving fast.
Really depends on the hardware. My XPS 17 didn’t have fully functional sound (speakers, mic, headset) until kernel 5.11. And even then, if I restart, I lose everything except speakers. The solution is to shutdown and then boot up.
Mine doesn't. I have a Jabra 75t elite, 20.04, and after trying to unpair and repair 3 times I have to run this goddamn script to keep the microphone volume up or it always auto-adjusts it to 0.
I have the same pair, they work flawlessly on my Manjaro desktop/laptop. The audio sounds the same as it does on Windows/Android/Apple devices, at least on my machines.
Yeah well ... I'm not an audio driver engineer, my Linux distro is the most popular (Ubuntu), came with PulseAudio, and I just want my audio to "just work" so I can have my damn meeting and work on the other Linux-based things I need to work on.
