It's pretty ironic to have problems with audio not recognizing headphones... on WINDOWS.
Multi-trillion (10^12) dollar company, btw.
(Both laptops are reasonably new.)
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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Heh, so ALSA has kind of been the audio architecture for Linux distros since forever.
Pulse Audio was supposed to modernize audio for Linux and ultimately replace ALSA.
But last time I installed Linux on my desktop, I couldn't get audio output from my motherboard's TOSLINK S/PDIF port no matter which settings I changed in the GUI, uninstalled/reinstalled drivers and codecs and whatnot, etc.
Nothing made any difference until I eventually found some forum post which suggested using ALSAmixer to check the settings for various audio channels. ALSAmixer is not typically installed by default and not commonly used anymore, but it was the only tool that could unmute the digital audio output channel that served the TOSLINK port - that functionality was not present anywhere else in any of the configuration options. Pulse appeared to be in control of the system audio hardware, but in reality it was just sitting on top of and still relying on ALSA to handle the back end. Also, whoever set ALSA to mute some audio channels by default on a clean install... wtf dude, that shit just makes people think their hardware isn't properly supported and they have a driver issue.
The point being, ALSA was supposed to be deprecated years ago and all of the old audio issues resolved and modernized with a new architecture, but... I'll believe it when I see it, when whatever the new thing is actually proves itself to be an all-singing, all-dancing audio architecture. I've seen this rodeo before, and last time I checked it was still a clownshow.
Interesting. Thanks for explaining.