For a long time, the common perception was that 'Linux audio' was the punchline for a not particularly funny joke. I sort of shared that belief; although audio had basically worked for me for a long time, I had a simple configuration and dreaded having to make more complex audio work in my unusual desktop environment. But these days, audio seems to just work for me, even in systems that have somewhat complex audio options.

On my office desktop, I've wound up with three potential audio outputs and two audio inputs: the motherboard's standard sound system, a USB headset with a microphone that I use for online meetings, the microphone on my USB webcam, and (to my surprise) a HDMI audio output because my LCD displays do in fact have tiny little speakers built in. In PulseAudio (or whatever is emulating it today), I have the program I use for online meetings set to use the USB headset and everything else plays sound through the motherboard's sound system (which I have basic desktop speakers plugged into). All of this works sufficiently seamlessly that I don't think about it, although I do keep a script around to reset the default audio destination.

On my home desktop, for a long time I had a simple single-output audio system that played through the motherboard's sound system (plus a microphone on a USB webcam that was mostly not connected). Recently I got an outboard USB DAC and, contrary to my fears, it basically plugged in and just worked. It was easy to set the USB DAC as the default output in pavucontrol and all of the settings related to it stick around even when I put it to sleep overnight and it drops off the USB bus. I was quite pleased by how painless the USB DAC was to get working, since I'd been expecting much more hassles.

(Normally I wouldn't bother meticulously switching the USB DAC to standby mode when I'm not using it for an extended time, but I noticed that the case is clearly cooler when it rests in standby mode.)

This is still a relatively simple audio configuration because it's basically static. I can imagine more complex ones, where you have audio outputs that aren't always present and that you want some programs (or more generally audio sources) to use when they are present, perhaps even with priorities. I don't know if the Linux audio systems that Linux distributions are using these days could cope with that, or if they did would give you any easy way to configure it.

(I'm aware that PulseAudio and so on can be fearsomely complex under the hood. As far as the current actual audio system goes, I believe that what my Fedora 41 machines are using for audio is PipeWire (also) with WirePlumber, based on what processes seem to be running. I think this is the current Fedora 41 audio configuration in general, but I'm not sure.)