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Comment by drcross | Hacker News Reader

It took me about a month of on/off attempts to get audio to stop routing through HDMI every time my desktop came out of suspend and I still have a basic understanding on how the audio system works on my machine. While I praise the open source community for everything they've done it's still really hard for even an advanced user to understand how things work. Its flabbergasting at how it has reached this situation.

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That's odd. I found my Linux system always got HDMI audio right while Windows always got it wrong. I seem to recall I was able to force VLC to go to the right place by adding it to a config file, but the system sound never did work right on Windows...I had to manually select HDMI every time it got plugged back in.

You had the wrong default selected in Windows mixer.

Need to select it as default when plugged and whenever it gets replugged it retake its priority. Works as expected with multiple default / temporarily plugged devices.

Interface might need a bit of a clean up though.

I think it was a buggy driver more than a Windows problem, as I tried selecting it as the default. It sometimes wouldn't show up when re-plugged in, as well. I'd even have to reboot sometimes to get it to show up as an option.

Doesn't work for me (not the person you are replying to) - every time I change input on my monitors Windows starts trying to use them for audio - doesn't matter what default I set, even disabling them.

I can second that. I'm by no means a fan of PulseAudio, I got bitten by it many times in the past, but my experience with Windows and audio over HDMI has been at least as bad. Even with a fully updated Windows 10 and a bog-standard on-board audio chip, Windows consistently messes up my speaker configuration or randomly mutes the audio. Particularly after updates it regularly forgets that I have a 5.1 receiver hooked up over HDMI and defaults back to stereo, and I have to re-configure it again.

I felt like that when I couldn't configure GNOME to shutdown when I hit the power-button on my chassis, I could only pick to suspend.

It is not possible to change the power settings and it was removed by the GNOME developers[0] (the shutdown/power off action was considered too destructive[1]).

Bottom line: You can no longer power off your laptop by pressing the power off button.

[0] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=755953

[1] https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-settings-daemon/commit/69d9d8...

Well, technically you can still power it down with the power button, but that's not so graceful to say the least.

This isn't a problem only for FOSS - windows starts dumping my audio down my monitors whenever I change input on them, even if I specifically disable the device. I actually don't see any issues like that on arch with pulse.

OSX remembers per device settings and reapplies them when the new device is visible. I haven't used windows seriously in 15 years. Linux has really bad UX most of the time. OSX is the best of the worst.

I've stopped counting how often OS X moves audio streams to the wrong headset on my work notebook.

it will remember volume levels for various configurations. I stand by best of the worst.

Does OS X even have an OS level volume mixer? Can I set my background music to be 20% of my video game without going into each of their inbuilt volume sliders? Can I move apps between audio devices? In a showdown between OS X, Windows and Pulse for audio setups as a consumer, OS X comes dead last and I use all 3 regularly.

FWIW I have the same issue on osx. :)

You can set one of them as fallback and it will remember, each time you plug the device. See: https://i.imgur.com/iazUIo8.png

I've only dealt with this on Intel chipset HDMI - if I'm remembering correctly there's some part of the snd_hda_intel kernel modules you can blacklist in order to disable this.

Now extrapolate this to the same author's init system that controls how your machine boots. He didn't become much better programmer since then.

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