Hello,
I come around linux every 4-5 years and try things out.
As has been the case for like, 20 years now, I'm having issues with ALSA.(from Red-Hat on Floppy and Corel Linux up to pretty much every distro right now). Every.single.time.
I have the onboard audio disabled in bios. THe Raedon has its HDMI Audio, detected as default. I passed enabled = 0 into the driver params, to no avail. Managed to get ALSASTORE to work after selecting the ENVY 24. Still only stereo with pulse. Disabling Pulse and using ALSA yielded no better results. Envy24Control won't launch as it doesn't seem to see the card that the OS does.
I remove that card and put back in my SB Live! 24. Same thing, AND I have to go select the card in ALSA.
NO option in M4 to disable or nerf the card.
Can't unload the module for the other sound b/s of an error about device not ready.
I'd like just my Envy as the default sound card. I'd love the 7.1 to work, given my investment in audio equipment. I'd also love it to death if I could get stereo expander to work (clone stereo to 7.1).
I'm going to forgo my rant about what seems to me like an unending and common plague that probably should've been addressed before years of work went into skinning options for the DEs. Personally I'd take a distro that has easy peasy, instantly working and broadly configurable audio options over one with an ever growing repository of bling bling any day.