Not the parent poster, but I'll chime in.

I have a pretty solid Dell laptop from work, and yet, there is one frustration that beats out anything else: audio.

I can't play music without it stuttering and skipping and sounding choppy and cutting out if something resource-intensive is happening, like Firefox loading a new page (but how often does THAT happen?)

Same with audio notifications. When my "new mail" notification sounds choppy, the underlying system must be just absolute garbage.

My main complaint on windows is more on the UI than the technical audio. I've got like 15 audio devices listed under the audio menu and windows can never figure out which one I intend to be playing from (and gives them terrible names) so I have to constantly be manually switching it around until I find the right one. My experience on Mac and Linux is that they seem to be able to switch to the right device as it connects then switch back appropriately when it disconnects.

Makes sense actually. That's been an annoyance of mine as well. I suppose I never realized it's better on other platforms.

Keeps switching between different outputs in games and no matter what I do with the default communication device etc. it keeps happening. I lose audio in games on random intervals and I don't get it back until I switch my output device to something else and back.

Used to happen only in Warzone but now I'm noticing it affects games with other engines as well.

Granted I have a very non-standard setup but it shouldn't be causing any of these issues.

Does Windows think that audio devices are being connected or disconnected? That's the only time I've had the default device switch on me. Annoyingly it can end up happening if you have a display that presents itself as an audio endpoint and then that display is turned off or even just goes to sleep.

Interesting perspective. I had always blamed it on something pertaining to my VFIO setup but I think you are pointing out something that might be at play here that I hadn't considered before.

I'll disable the speakers on the monitor from the HW menu on the monitor and see if that helps.

Maybe they just mean the audio UI? It's complex, and at least on Windows 10 it's a mix of the new UI and old UI.

For example, figuring out how to configure and test surround sound channels means click through multiple dialogs, and it's not clear how exactly to get there.

With Windows 10, it's even harder to access sound mixer than it was on previous versions, and this is what to use in 99% after clicking on audio icon in the taskbar.

USB hotplug is still a mess in Windows and so using any external audio interface or soundcard is just a mess.

The UI is complete garbage but siblings said enough about that dumpster fire already.

USB hotplug works fine, and has for 20+ years now. You may be blaming the OS for your vendor's incompetence at driver maintenance.

Standby/Resume or hibernate? Let's roll a 12-sided dice on wakeup, "1" is for "I forget all settings about a random device and re-install the driver" and "2" is for "I gonna act like it's not even there until you plug it out and back in again". Using a different USB port today? Hope you don't mind re-configuring!

This is especially annoying for audio devices, because lots of applications - and certainly any slightly more advanced setup - require explicit configuration of audio devices and when Windows does its "it's a different thing every time I see it" temper tantrum this means you have to go back to every application and tell it again "Yeah, that OUT3-4 that doesn't exist any more? Use the OUT3-4 that does exist", because the user-visible name stays the same (it's the same hardware, after all), while the underlying ID changes for one reason or another.

This has nothing to do with vendor's drivers btw., this is simply how hotplug works in Windows' driver model.

So no, this is not "working fine".