The Long Road to Linux-Only (Not Excluding a Bit of WINE)
Remember the undetected headphones issue I had with many Linux distros? I was wrong to be so stubborn as to try to fix it in the current and future distros–and to make it a key point in choosing a distro!
As I mentioned in almost every post tagged Linux since last June, on my oldish laptop (not the exact configuration, as mine had an extra HDD now swapped for an extra SSD) in almost every distro that is not Debian 10, the system fails to detect when I insert the headphones and continues to play through the speakers.
Of course, the funny thing is that it’s all the fault of those idiots who thought of moving everything in software, from door handles to push-buttons that cannot be pushed anymore. In this case, they uninvented the audio jack that automatically and mechanically switched the audio output upon the insertion of the jack:
This is why I could read on some web pages about the “audio jack driver”; no, the driver is not for the jack itself. With the modern non-switching audio jacks, the hardware (here, Realtek’s ALC282 chip) knows when a jack is inserted (impedance, duh), but instead of automatically switching the audio output, it waits for a command given by the OS via a driver. Switching the audio output should have been the default behavior, with a possible software command to revert it, but it’s not how those retards have designed the hardware.
