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Comment by timonoko | Hacker News Reader

These are very good. All sound like real music.

We need somebody to finally fix the Linux sound system. Took me TWO HOURS to make the Pulseaudio to play Midi.

We had a normal sound system. We even had two! OSS and Alsa. And then Pulse ate up twenty years of devtime of an innumerable amount of devs to become somewhat usable.

I do not understand these error messages. What am I supposed todo. Except fresh install of course.

    sudo apt install pulseaudio-module-jack 
    [sudo] password for tnoko: 
    Reading package lists... Done
    Building dependency tree       
    Reading state information... Done
    Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
    requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
    distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
    or been moved out of Incoming.
    The following information may help to resolve the situation:
    
    The following packages have unmet dependencies:
    pulseaudio-module-jack : Depends: libpulse0 (= 1:11.1-1ubuntu7)
              but 1:11.1-1ubuntu7.2 is to be installed
                   Depends: pulseaudio (= 1:11.1-1ubuntu7)
    E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

"You have held broken packages".

-- What is "held"?

"Hold" is a package state that may be set to not change that package in any way. If it is currently installed, keep it installed and at that version, if it is currently not installed, do not install it under any circumstances.

"Broken" means that the package in question has dependency conflicts, unfulfilled dependencies or stuff like that. If an installation, upgrade or deinstallation is requested, the dependency solver will look for a solution without broken packages (naturally). If a broken package is in a "held" state, it cannot be changed, so the solver has no solution without any broken packages, which is why it will give up with the error you are seeing.

Try "apt -f install", and maybe (if it isn't "delete everything", which can happen, or does other undesirable stuff) accept the suggested solution. If that simple fix doesn't help, here are more involved solutions: https://askubuntu.com/questions/223237/unable-to-correct-pro...

Don't try to combine ALSA (which is what Pulseaudio uses by default on most distributions) with Jack. You'll have a huge amount of "fun".

Don't try to "make Pulseaudio play MIDI".

Just install Timidity.

The Linux sound system isn't broken. It is in excellent shape. If you choose your distro wisely [1], you will get amazing sound on Linux. You may even discover that Linux Audio rocks hard, like no other platform. [2]

What is not working, is your distributions' responsibility for setting it all up for you. What's your distro?

[1] - http://ubuntustudio.org/ [2] - http://zynthian.org/

XUbuntu 18.04.3 LTS

It is possibly eroded somewhat by liberal use of "apt -F install".

But something was wrong to begin with because Wine and Virtualbox refused to install properly. "i7-3770 CPU" + [GeForce GTX 760].

But this is my Steam-machine mostly, which works OK, so no actual alarms.

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