linuxmemes

I am just pissed that my bluetooth earbuds at work, ever since upgrading to Win10 (I think? Been a while ago), have issues with their microphones.

If I join a meeting every few minutes audio quality turns robotic, sounds like a very low quality phone call. The only solution is before I join a meeting and almost every time I connect my earbuds, to deselect the microphone on them and instead use the laptop microphone. Which you cannot do "on the fly" while in a meeting, because then you of course just lose all sound immediately.

So it is either being ok with sound quality going down every few minutes, making it difficult to hear people, or dropping in and out of the meeting akwardly to correct this, should I forget this before the meeting.

They worked fine pre-Win10. They still work fine on any other non-Windows device I use. There is absolutely no reason to justify this but somehow it does not get fixed.

I'm sure Linux is great with headphones too, but is there really a widespread issue with them in Windows?

Obviously it's not difficult to "recognise" a headset plugged into the 3.5mm jack, so I'm presuming the author means Bluetooth.

In general, I've been very impressed with the improved audio system and controls between Win10 & 11, it needed a big upgrade and we got it. Similarly, Bluetooth UI and ease of use has shot up too. The old Bluetooth UI was awful.

I use various Bluetooth audio devices daily, as well as 3.5mm audio stuff, and have various needs for routing and altering audio with virtual audio cables, etc, and it all works flawlessly for me.

I'm just one person though, not really a great sample size!

Anyway, I'm surprised to hear there's a widespread issue with Bluetooth audio in Windows 11, given how standardised and widely used everything is these days. You'd think that'd be ironed out reasonably quickly, lest hundreds of millions of people struggle :-(

It flipped a good while ago. Win 8 I think

I wish I could fix my audio issues with Retroarch on SteamOS, I can't get any audio to play even in the menus for RetroArch TT_TT

That's a driver thing, so it's wrong to blame Windows for this, when the drivers probably aren't even made by Microsoft.

Between my Linux laptop, my window gaming computer, and my apple work laptop I never have audio issues.

The entire volume control and Bluetooth connection management in Windows is an insane pile of garbage that seems deliberately hard to navigate and frequently doesn't work for no apparent reason. Which is wild because they could have just not changed it at all since it used to be fine.

Simping pipe wire ... That's a choice.

Windows keep re-enabling my second monitor after I disabled it, I had to disconnect video cable but in Linux it work just fine (dual boot)

I run Ubuntu on a laptop that isn't officially supported by Ubuntu (Thinkbook 16 G7) and it works better than W11

f you have wired or properly standards compliant bluetooth headphones it works fine on both.

If you have (cheapo) non-compliant stuff it's a crapshoot on both, but there's more likely some drivers to make up the difference on windows, whereas on linux you're deep diving obscure crap, it can be done, but is it really worth the effort?

If it's musical instruments, especially midi, you're often better off on linux these days, but you might have to pay for a DAW and some commercial plugins are hit or miss.