Wrt audio:

What any pulseaudio or pipewire-based desktop can do, is to route streams from separate applications to separate devices. You can have one application playing into your headphones, second into your speakers and third streaming over bluetooth to your soundbar. Never managed to do anything similar with Mac (also I never explored any 3rd-party apps to do it, they might exist, but with PA/Pipewire, it is built-in).

You can also mark some devices as not to use - i.e. DisplayPort advertises audio out, but the monitor has no speakers? So does your dock, but you don't intend to connect any speakers to it? Easy, disable that device. Not so easy on mac, just be sure to never select it for output, there's only one global output device anyway.

I personally used advanced PulseAudio features all the time by playing different audio in headphones and speakers, but it's still rarely used feature compared to audio volume control.

One of neatest things I did on Linux is playback of multiple audio streams while watching series when using VLC. It's very cool when you have some international group of friends together and e.g someone prefer to watch in German, someone in English and then someone in some other language.

So basically 3 people can connect their headphones to Linux PC and then everyone listen to their preferable language.

How do you rig all that stuff up? Commandline or is there a pretty gui for doing it?

Getting VLC to output multiple tracks simultaneously (or more correctly, all tracks) is via command line parameters (--sout-all --sout \#display).

Mapping the streams to specific devices can be done via clicky GUI in pavucontrol.

I do this with a paid app called Loopback https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/

control external monitor sound: if your monitor supports DCC, MonitorControl is FOSS and allows direct control. Also, see below.

capture sound: there's a flury of apps that allow you to do that, Rogue Amoeba has a couple that go from simple to very advanced audio routing. This audio routing also allows you to set the output volume (so, indirectly volume sent to a monitor) using the standard macOS controls.

> And yeah PulseAudio is just so much better than everything macOS can offer.

Someone has never dug into Audio Midi Setup, which can do a bunch of nice things already, including creating aggregated audio inputs and outputs.

Having to install an app to control volume does seem like something from the early 1990s (and I’m a mac guy).

It's annoying that Apple doesn't implement DDC control alright (neither volume nor brightness). I'm just trying to be helpful and point to solutions that I use daily for these use cases, not making a case, barely pointing out that things claimed to be impossible are not (and not argumentatively, only because folks may stop at that and have to endure something when there are solutions that would fit their use case)

Imagine having to install kernel extensions just to adjust the volume over a digital output like HDMI, maddening since you know it can do it, but stock MacOS won't allow you to. Or how about volume levels by app?

> And yeah PulseAudio is just so much better than everything macOS can offer.

The PulseAudio that is one of the factors that drove me off desktop linux in 2013? :)

Shockingly, years of continued development can indeed resolve a lot of issues with software.

Not only development of PA itself.

Since the message that PA was here to stay was received, everyone got the point that the only way forward was to fix all the buggy audio drivers. It's no surprise, that it helped. Sure, it sucked for the affected users at the time, but in the long run, we all are better off.

I believe it's because we know who is now concentrating on systemd. Maybe in 2080 that will be flawless too. Even usable perhaps? :)

> The PulseAudio that is one of the factors that drove me off desktop linux in 2013? :)

Yes that one :)

It still sucks if you have to get too close to it and work around some of it's uh... things. But during normal usage, "it just works" these days and has been for a long time.

I'd still easily pick it over audio on windows. Also it's on the way out, and pipewire, which is replacing it is way more powerful again, while being drop-in. Let's see how long it takes for pipewire to be really stable though. But imo windows and OSX cannot compete with pulse, and certainly not with pipewire.

Have you tried Pipewire? It's pretty wonderful.

Not yet. I switched to use macOS as my daily driver and I still used Ubuntu 20.04 on my desktop. In any case Pulse worked well enough for me.

> - Control external monitor sound volume. There are buggy paid and open source solutions, but they all trigger all kind of bugs with sound and macOS itself.

For me this is one of the most annoying missing feature of macOS, while there are 3rd party apps, I'd want to have it without installing anything extra. But as we know it hard (if not impossible) that Apple implements this feature for other than their supported devices (that is mostly their products and maybe some of the 3rd party displays that they sell in their official web store).

You can use macOS’s Audio MIDI Setup app to control the volume of each sound channel separately. Not easy to find, but it is built in.

Yeah I used Audio MIDI Setup and it does enable some use-cases. It's still wont let you capture app's audio without 3rd-party dummy device driver and said drivers are buggy mess.

Even Discord offer an option to audio game capture and one of first steps to install is "Disable SIP".

Awesome! Now I can listen to music using headphones while being able to play it through the MacBook speakears at the same time. That'll provide a better social experience of listening to music.

I'm sure there are more uses to be found but that was the most immediate I found.

Routinely use Audio MIDI to watch content with someone using multiple bluetooth earphones. Quite a nice and easy interface.

> Being able to wait for files to copy and work Finder at the same time.

What?

Exactly what I posted. I have no idea why, but while I wait to copy somethign to USB stick Finder show that copy popup and dont let me do anything else.

I don't think I've ever seen that happen.