It’s not great.

Our production servers are all Linux and we have a fully Linux dev stack. My request for a Linux work machine was denied and we have to work in WSL.

Even if you are confident in your Linux skills this isn’t a bad idea. I’ve seen too many OS installers put things on drives other than the one you choose to risk it at this point.

Speedtest.net, Steam, well populated torrents, and the Star Citizen patcher are the only things I’ve experienced my full downstream of 1.5Gbps with.

To be fair his prior rant was about how bad he was at using and understanding Linux.

I’m all for more people switching to linux, but a lot of your windows issues sound less like windows issues and more like your specific installation is messed up somehow issues.

One thing I will mention though is that Windows does have native per-application volume control, you don’t need to install EarTrumpet. You can right-click the system tray volume icon and open the mixer, or just search for “volume mixer” in the start menu.

Always 5% higher than it currently is.

Headless server accessed via SSH. Hosting Jellyfin, FoundryVTT, a Discord bot that I just mess around with, and also use it to run an IRC client inside screen.

Since they’re both Sony

This would very likely work with most modern TVs that support HDMI CEC. Manufacturers like to put their own name on it, but Sony Bravia Link, Samsung Anynet+, LG SimpLink, Roku 1-Touch, and several more, are all just different names for the same control protocol.

The machine I have running mint is a fifteen year old Core 2 Duo T6600 laptop. Works great!

Yeah, there are different bluetooth audio profiles, one for high quality audio intended for media consumption, and one for bi-directional audio intended for telephony (and some others, but these are the relevant ones here). The “gotcha” is that in general, any attempt to consume the mic feed from a bluetooth headset will switch it to the telephony mode, so if you have them paired to a PC and an application is listening to the mic for any purpose you get stuck with much lower quality 64kbps PCM audio.

Hey, my Brother laser printer can see my screen, you know! Apologise now!

Literally the only reason I ever fire up a different browser. Come on guys.

Totally agree that a lot of them are poor implementations. Or just have a terrible UX such that it’s almost guaranteed that a layperson is going to set it up badly and have a degraded experience that they’ve convinced themselves is good. Obviously the “correct” thing to do is check every box for “enhancements”, right?

Gaming peripheral software supplied by the OEM being bad is probably the least surprising thing I’m likely to read all day.

As for stereo sounding better, I think in the purest sense that’s always going to be true. Any kind of processing is going to alter the audio to some degree away from the original “intent”. A pure triangle wave from a NES isn’t going to be a pure triangle wave after it goes through any HRTF, good, bad, or otherwise. If you want your sound to be clean then yes, avoid extra processing at all costs.

First, I apologise for assuming you were uninformed. That’s clearly not the case.

I agree that if a game has its own headphone surround solution then that’s preferable to anything external to the game. And yes, turning on both just mangles your sound and should not ever be done.

A theoretical game that doesn’t have its own HRTF doesn’t need to provide full soundscape details for a external virtual surround to work though. It just won’t be as good. If the game can output 7.1 audio but lacks HRTF for headphones the processor can at least use the surround channel positions to inform an HRTF, so that the right rear channel sounds like it’s behind you and to the right, etc. If the game is stereo only, maybe you want your NES emulator audio to sound like it’s coming from the screen in front of you instead of strapped to your head.

All that aside though, OP also didn’t mention games. Maybe he’s got some DTS7.1 movies he wants to watch, in which case HRTF by channel position is the only option.

You should read up on head related transfer functions. Virtual surround is much more than just “an audio equaliser that makes footsteps louder”.

My breaking point was when the dotnet CLI installed as a snap, which of course isolated its environment, which made it unable to interoperate correctly with the projects I was trying to build.

Asinine.

Literally the opposite of what they wanted.