Comment by ofalkaed - Hacker Neue

ofalkaed Dec 30, 2025 parent

PipeWire seems to solve all the audio stuff for me, zero problems since I made the switch. I had audio fail on resume once when I first installed PipeWire; if memory serves it was that the default settings for PipeWire was to restart the audio server on resume which screwed things up because Jack kept running. Something like that. The fix was simple, just comment out a line and uncomment another. Everything audio has just worked ever since.

I have not had any UI issues in at least a decade on Slackware. The few times I tried Mint over the years, it was filled with random annoyances like you mention.

Edit: This is not advocating using Slackware for audio work, it works great but it is Slackware and most don't get along with the Slackware way. But there is a DAW module for AlienBob's Slackware Live Edition[0]. It worked alright when I tried it, as well as any other live distro.

[0] https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:liveslak

bnastic Dec 30, 2025

I dont/didn't use Jack at all, straight into pipewire, which makes for a super unintuitive way to select 'audio device' in Reaper (iirc, something like select ALSA and 'default's for input/output and somehow that's all routed via pipewire). I'm not unhappy about pipewire, I finally have a low-ish latency audio system (enough for mixing, if not recording) that I don't have to spend hours on to get it to work. A la MacOS.

But generally that's my point, 'it works if you go and edit this obscure line in this obscure config file'. Mac has had a stable CoreAudio backend for quarter of a century now (counterpoint - Windows is also a mess). I wish Linux would stabilise their userland a bit more and stop rewriting stuff every few years.

Sometimes I wish there was a commercial company behind 'linux for audio' that will give me a finely tuned Linux distro on a finely tuned desktop machine, based on whatever distro, I don't really care. But have it all released/patched at their own pace, as long as everything 'just works'. I'd be happy to pay for that. The whole 'OS due upgrade, is anything going to work tomorrow, I have a session' is still an unsolved problem on _every_ OS/platform. Most busy studio heads go years without installing/upgrading _anything_ for fear of having a lemon after said upgrade, with clients waiting at the door.

ofalkaed OP Dec 30, 2025

>Sometimes I wish there was a commercial company behind 'linux for audio' that will give me a finely tuned Linux distro on a finely tuned desktop machine, based on whatever distro,

That would be Ubuntu Studio or Kx-Studio. Mint is quite far from what you want unless you are willing to put in the time to set it up right. Most any distro which ships PipeWire with Jack support enabled will probably perform better than your Mint setup running ALSA. PipeWire speaks Jack so if built with Jack support, any Jack aware application will connect to PipeWire with no need to start Jack or anything, it just works.

It is not an obscure file that I had to edit, it is the file (script) which starts the server. Took maybe 5 minutes to get everything working flawlessly and that includes compiling PipeWire since Slackware does not build it with Jack support and a google search to find out why resume killed the audio.

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