I’ve been distro-hopping on my pinebook laptop recently, decided first to get rid of Manjaro and go back to Debian/GNOME.

Gnome 3 is still just slightly too laggy for ordinary use, so this morning in order to get some work done I switched to the Mate desktop. In both cases I was installing the desktop from the base (minimal) system, rather than setting it up through the standard system install process. My environment was missing a lot of extras like the network-manager applet… and I think I’m missing some audio server stuff.

Something about the way the board in the laptop handles audio means that it only recognises one audio device, all sound plays through both the speakers and the headphone jack. So when you play music with your headphones on, you can also hear traces of the same song coming from the laptop speakers, and it sounds great!

Although, it’s probably less great for people who are in the same room and don’t want to listen to your music. I’m going to fix the sound issue at some point, or have another go at learning to use sway, but for the moment I’m enjoying this weird effect.