Real talk people... seriously look into what it takes to switch to Linux. Its short term pain and maybe not as much as you think. Yes you will have to learn some new things, but anything is better than Microsoft's "You need an account with us to use your PC" and "You can only select privacy 3 times a year".

@arcturax I couldn't figure out how to reproduce my sound setup on Linux, and I sort of depend on it.

@coffee by "sound setup" do you mean just speakers or is this a musical creation thing? I can see some specialized equipment maybe causing a problem due to lack of drivers. If you are on a distro that has a discord help room, you might check there, maybe someone there might have suggestions. You could dual boot back to Windows if needed, or use a VM if things pass through ok, but if its something you are using daily that could be a pain point.

@arcturax I have an audio interface, a bunch of virtual audio devices, and a USB MIDI controller that I use to control volumes of all those virtual devices and toggle the routing between them on the fly.
For instance, I have three virtual sinks that receive audio from games, music players, and voice chat apps, and I have several virtual sources. I have physical sliders to control the volume of all those sinks and sources, and buttons that direct sound from sinks selectively to sources, for example to only route game audio to OBS and nothing else, or redirect music from an audio player to a virtual device I use as a microphone so I can do karaoke and stuff; plus, a few of the buttons on the MIDI controller are Discord keyboard shortcut macros.
Most importantly, whenever I use the mic, I need to be routing what my mic picks up back into my headphones for monitoring, and do so with little or no latency.

@coffee Ahh so pretty specialized stuff. I don't really know much about music production or audio, so I can't be much help on that. You would probably have to reach out to some audioheads who also use Linux to get pointers, and hopefully don't hit any show stoppers, assuming you aren't already at that point.

@arcturax I spent two months researching it and reaching out. The solutions that exist take someone with a lot more technical knowledge to set up, and someone with a lot more free time to maintain it.
It doesn't look like anyone who does Linux is into audio to such a degree, so the whole audio scene is severely underdeveloped when it comes to documentation and convenient tools.

@coffee sorry to hear that. Yeah there are some things like this where tou have problems. Hopefully in the years to come music equipment support will evolve the way gaming and installation and gui has.

@arcturax @coffee I would have thought JACK (which stands for JACK Audio Connection Kit, of course) offered a solution, but given your research I assume you've already considered that and found it has limitations.

@arcturax @coffee honestly I set up Fedora on a PC recently and audio was the first thing to break. When it's not audio, it's WiFi. Linux has a troubled history with those two items.

@TerrorBite @coffee I haven't run into those two myself. I do know that audio drivers have been a big area of work and change over the last few years. Was just seeing something called Pipewire which plans to "fix Linux audio" but we have heard such bold plans before. Maybe this will be the big fix.

@arcturax @coffee It was pipewire that failed for me after an upgrade, but reinstalling some packages fixed it. I'm still not sure what the issue actually was.

I've been around long enough to remember when OSS was the standard, though only one thing could write to /dev/dsp at a time. But it was simple and easy to understand.

Then came ALSA, and on top of that Pulseaudio was built, and now we have Pipewire that seems to build on top of those again. We now have a system that, while capable, is complex.

@TerrorBite
@arcturax @coffee pipewire directly accesses the kernel alsa apis and provides alsa, pulseaudio, and jack compat