Comment by Verdex
1 day ago
My gaming PC isn't compatible with windows 11, so it was the first to get upgraded to Linux. Immediate and significant improvement in experience.
Windows kept logging down the system trying to download a dozen different language versions of word (for which I didn't have a licence and didn't want regardless). Steam kept going into a crash restart cycle. Virus scanner was ... being difficult.
Everything just works on Linux except some games on proton have some sound issues that I still need to work out.
>> some sound issues
Is this 1998? Linux is forever having sound issues. Why is sound so hard?
Sound (oss, alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire...), bluetooth, WiFi are eternal problematic Linux paper cuts.
As always It is Not Linux Fault, but it is Linux Problem.
It's one of the reasons why I moved to OSX + Linux virtual machine. I get the best of both worlds. Plus, the hardware quality of a 128GB unified RAM MacBookPro M4 Max is way beyond anything else in the market.
I think the situation has flipped in the past few years. Since Pipewire came out, I haven't had any problems with audio on Linux and I can dial the latency down to single-digit ms. Meanwhile, on Mac audio has gotten far worse, especially since Tahoe. The latency is tens of ms and I get crackling and skipping when there's high CPU usage.
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In some games I get a crackle in the audio which I don't get through any native application, nor some games run with proton. I don't know if that's what he means, but it hasn't bothered me enough to figure it out. I use bluetooth headphones anyway, I'm relatively insensitive to audio fidelity.
If you run pw-top, you might see errors accumulating. This is usually due to an underrun from the game requesting an audio quantum that’s too low.
The fix is:
Basically, just force the quantum to be higher. Often it defaults to 64, which is around 1ms.
Linux sound is fine at least for me. The problem is running Windows games in proton. Sound will suddenly stop, then come back delayed. Apparently a known issue on some systems.
Pipewire + lowlatency kernel fixes 99% sound issues
To be fair, you can have sound issues on windows too. It's not usually on issue on linux anymore either though.
The problem is games over Wine/Proton doing weird things with the sound. Not the sound itself on modern Linux. Heck, I have less issues using audio stuff, or just changing the audio volume on Linux than on the crappy Windows.