The only issues I’ve had were audio related, first the soundcard wouldn’t work and I switched to a USB mixer, but after waking the computer this morning the USB mixer won’t work and now I have to use the magically working built in sound card. What’s that about?
Anyway, Linux has come a long way. The freezes that sometimes occured in the game I’m playing aren’t even happening anymore.
E: I should probably clarify that the audio issue spans the whole operating system, not just the game.
This has been my exact experience with Linux throughout the last 2 decades. Old computers, new computers, it doesn’t matter. The reliability of the audio systems have always been horrible for me.
I do not understand how the things work, which means I’m not going to be able to know what needs to happen, but through troubleshooting of specifically audio throughout the years I pretty much get the feeling that most “solutions” are entirely made up and no one actually understands why those solutions work. It’s weird, because other issues don’t generally have that feel.
It’s almost always a compatibility issue. It’s kind of arcane obscure stuff, like the particular version of the particular sound chip that somehow works 99% of the time with the same kernel drivers for the chip family but has some small bug that makes the audio engine bork. Allegedly Pipewire has been working hard at being more resilient to those issues and it’s been integrated progressively in more and more distributions.
Yeah it’s been so much worse just some years ago. I’m forever traumatised by the acronym ALSA.
ALSA was a big step up over OSS.