Max

I’ve had a lot of regressions, almost entirely around graphics drivers. I have like the worst case scenario. A 4K laptop (also dell) with an nvidia GPU in a prime configuration with the Intel graphics. Until very recently everything was laggy or unstable or unsupported. With recent drivers things have been more fine.

I also have weird audio issues like the card sometimes selecting a non available profile when disconnected from HDMI (hence why I asked about that)

CUPS has been really stable for me. Idk

Also yeah, docks seem to expose all of the bugs, even on windows. For the longest time I couldn’t get my keyboard to work if booting with a dock, and I still have weird resolution issues with booting while connected sometimes.

On an entirely different note, as far as I’m aware secure boot should have zero noticeable performance impact, and if it does, that means that something is going horribly wrong. Guides tell you yo disable secure boot because it’s annoying/semis complicated to administer and makes installing out of kernel modules harder (like the nvidia drivers), not because it has a performance or stability impact on the system.

Hmm. If it’s persistent across installs then something is definitely borked. My next step would be to download the livecd images of a couple distributions and see if the audio works while booting into any of those live environments (ventoy makes this really painless)

When you reinstall, you’re not keeping any configuration, right?

If none of the livecd images work I’d liveboot windows and see if audio works there. If it doesn’t, definitely a hardware issue. If it does, then see if it starts working under Linux again. If it doesn’t, then something is incredibly cursed and I’m out of ideas since it used to work there.

Edit: a stupid question: do you have the right output profile selected for the card. Something like stereo duplex?

That sounds like a pretty cursed occurrence. As you get more familiar with the structure of your operating system, I’ve found diagnosing and fixing weird issues gets a lot easier. You also get a better sense of what component is responsible for what and what commands let you investigate.

I think it’s reasonable to say that weird issues don’t stop though. At least for me. I always had tons of weird occurrences on windows too. What feels different about Linux is that I try and figure them out because it’s possible I can. Where on windows I would just accept that x was broken.

For a random question in case it’s the same no audio bug I encountered recently: Do you happen to play audio via HDMI? And does any audio sink (speakers, etc…) show up in sound settings?

Also do you happen to be using an nvidia gpu (and if so, is it a laptop with an Intel CPU as well?). That freezing issue used to happen to me all the time with some games and it was entirely due to nvidia’s Linux driver bugs.