Alright hello. I have come from . I had posted to do with it again, but it got taken down for duplication (when it wasn't duplication). This post is more of my observations from experimenting and such. There are distros I haven't tried but I tried a wide range of distros like manjaro, ubuntu based ones and all solus flavors, and I was looking more for how well they worked out of the box, rather than with fiddling around with pulse, hdajack etc which I know will work eventually. If you stumbled across this from searching about the same issue I have (or similar) or are confused to what this is about, I suggest you look at my previous post also.
So anyways, I've tried the past few days mounting isos to usb drives and trying live os and installing various distros to see about the headphone issue. And my conclusion is that this issue affects the linux kernel in some way across the board. I don't really understand why completely but I have some kind of idea.
From installing fresh distros, I noticed that the earphones (they are 3.5mm earphones + mic) get recognised as a microphone and not as a speaker system of some kind. Every single time I had a look at the sound settings and in pulse, they came up as plugged microphone, with the internal speakers being the only output device every single time. It's really odd seeing as how ubuntu 14.04 and xubuntu etc from years past worked flawlessly with the earphones, even manjaro a while ago on my older craptop worked fine. I don't really understand why it doesn't work on my device now.
I'll leave my specs at the bottom of this post but what I think is is there's something the manufacturer did, or something like the cpu causes issue with linux. The manufacturer of my laptop is Lenovo, and the cpu/igpu is from AMD. A warning sign is that when installing a linux distro, it doesn't bring up the dual boot menu at startup like it should. Instead it completely hides the fact it exists until I use something like easyuefi to add an option for that distro, how it works is you specify the boot partition, whether it's linux or windows and the loader conf file for the distro. All of this hassle everytime doesn't appear on my craptop, because the dual boot menu appears flawlessly without issue. May be because it uses an Intel cpu/igpu unlike my newer laptop but it's hard to say.
Also, it seems like the devices that appear in a given distro when looking at alsa, is hd generic devices but by reloading alsa or any command that shows the full name of the device, it says it's Intel. I don't know if that would be an issue, maybe amd use intel sound drivers or something. It's odd nonetheless.
This issue has been boggling my mind for obvious reasons, with half-rhetorical questions like does linux not support the earphones anymore, whether out of accident from an overlooked bug in an update or intentionally phasing out? Is any of this AMD or Lenovo's fault? Even with proper headphones or something, will they fail? I don't think anyone here really knows, hell I'd bet an extreme that no one really understands why in the linux community. I kinda rambled in this post with stuff that should've been said in the last post/thread, but I'm saying it now.
Thanks for contributing thus far to this discussion in figuring this out.
Specs: AMD Ryzen 5 3500U Mobile CPU (2.2 - 3.7ghz quad core)
Radeon Vega 8 Integrated GPU, 8GB Ram, 256GB SSD.
Lenovo C340-14API Laptop
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