In article , John
Legon wrote:
In my own installations of Win2k and XP on several computers
(including the laptop in question), I have gone to the
manufacturers' websites and have downloaded device drivers and
utilities specific to the hardware. There has been no guesswork
or making of assumptions - the OS understands the specific
hardware and works the way it is intended to.

That's not actually how it works. The OS knows nothing about the
hardware except what the drivers tell it -- if you have the right
drivers then everything should work (that's true for almost any OS, not
just Windows).

There is always a degree of guesswork and assumption-making when you
visit the vendor's website and find drivers for a gazillion models of
hardware but none that has *exactly* the same model number as yours.

Alsa on my laptop, however, has clearly failed to identify the
hardware configuration, and provides mixer controls which serve no
purpose.

Linux sound drivers are a bit more of a black art than hardware drivers
(ALSA forms a layer above the actual hardware drivers, and getting it
configured appropriately is nowhere near as straightforward as getting
hardware drivers to spot their own bits of hardware and install
themselves).

The biggest problem here, it seems to me, is that there are competing
standards (ALSA, OSS, Pulse, whatever) and no common conventions,
interface, or utilities to make them all play (pun intended) nicely
together.

By default most people want to start with a fully functioning system
- bongs and all! They have the option to turn them off if they want
- but no Windows user would expect to have to fire up a terminal
program in order to toggle a mute control for an obscure surround
sound channel which isn't supported on the machine - just to get
basic functionality for sound whether for alerts or playing music
or videos etc..

No, with windows it's the other way around -- whenever you install it
you have to spend time turning OFF the inane jingles it likes to play to
itself whenever it starts up and shuts down (and a few more besides).

Somewhere in between that and the ALSA default silence would be nice!

It took me some time, a while ago, to try to get sound over HDMI out of
a Linux nettop thingie ... not only was the sound muted by default on
HDMI, the software needed to unmute it wasn't installed by default.

I agree that that's not very impressive.

Cheers,
Daniel.