If you aren't blessed with luck, one might say that PulseAudio still requires you to be a hacker to get sound. Over and over again. Every time you think it's fixed for good, it'll prove you wrong.

On the large majority of laptops I've installed Ubuntu on recently, sound has just worked out of the box, so here's to hoping my lucky streak continues!

Sure, sound works fine for a bit, but wait until you want to plug a USB headset in. First time, great. Second time, fail. Log out, log back in, headset works again. Lame!

It's all about having a common hardware profile.

Add any external sound hardware, use a optical or SPDIF port instead, add some speakers. It'll break sooner-or-later, and in my own experiences it tends to be whenever my personal computer gets away from the 'typical' desktop profile.

Try to plug in headset and have the sound out of it, plug it out and have the sound on the laptop speakers, without going all hacker on it, or for example just try to use your bluetooth headset. Yeah. Nope.

Or if you're even less lucky, PulseAudio still requires you to mute the "system sounds" thing because once skype starts, you get persistent noise out of the audio jack, after which you try to email Lennart following the guide on his page, only to receive no reply.

My current regular experience is:

Pulse audio + reconnecting bluetooth speaker after it powers off = bad day

+1 I tried for an hour to get PulseAudio to work with Bluetooth and A2DP and use my phone as a sound source. Decided I wasn't going to waste time on this. Gave up and ended up buying an external A2DP box off Amazon and plugged it into my Line In port.

It is this little things that made me move away from GNU/Linux as main laptop OS.

The OS is great when it works, but then those little things are always around the corner, turning weekend actions into weeks.

All of my computers run Linux, but that's because I can deal with most of the flaws. This is definitely part of the reason why desktop Linux has never taken off with the general public.

Also, the people who manage Linux distributions seem to absolutely love suddenly getting rid of things that work and replacing them with incomplete alternatives, without any kind of migration of user data and settings. Those alternatives should be pushed out as developer previews until they either

(1) match each and every feature of whatever they are replacing AND capable of importing all settings

OR

(2) warn the user months ahead of time with a list of features that are going to disappear in the replacement

OR

(3) provide an easy, 1-click option to let the user continue using whatever they were using as their default, with continued support and updates

Indeed.

But it is still my main OS everywhere, I refuse to bow to proprietary overlords. Despite these downsides.

I started working when proprietary overlords was the only option available, so it doesn't matter me that much.

What you mean?

I too perform work for enterprises, getting payed to work with and in all things Linux, Java and Python.

Just because its freedom software doesnt mean there is no money to be made or make.

I mean when I started working there wasn't open source as such.

Maybe the local computer club or some rich guys that could pay for BBS connections exchanging stuff.

Everything from hardware, text processing, drawing, music, compilers, editors,..., was provided by proprietary overlords.

Oh, you are ancient - respect!

I had luck, started around 1999 when RedHat 6.2 existed, with gcc, all from a free book and CD from the public library.

Years ago it didn't take me that long to get PulseAudio setup to play from my HTPC through my laptop (so that I could use the headphone jack on the laptop). That said, it wasn't plug-and-play. I didn't use it too often because there were too many moving parts every time I wanted to get it setup (i.e. setup the laptop to receive audio, then get the HTPC to connect to the laptop and send audio... then disable it all to get things back to normal afterwards).

What would have been preferable would be for the HTPC to advertise itself as a audio source, and the laptop to be able to list sources, and let the use select one.