The left hand speaker of my venerable Logitech speakers with a subwoofer has given up the ghost so I bought a newer one. Arrived and I installed it earlier.

Same problem. Oh, it might be due to my Ubuntu 24.04 LTS I installed last week. So I spent ages pissing about in alsa and pulse audio and eventually found something that modified the alsa conf file and rebooted. Still wouldn't recognise my Realtek alc4080 chipset. Uninstalled the pulse stuff and then tried the front USB connector that has an Intel audio chip, which worked (that's what the conf file update was for so, in my defence it might not have worked either initially). Realtek stopped supporting the Linux drivers in 2018, MSI has bugger all mobo drivers for Linux, and it would appear Ubuntu is a bit iffy too in this version. Can I blame Systemd? I'd like to blame Systemd.

What's infuriating is that there's no longer any central rallying points for this sort of stuff, it's all Medium posts and other blogs. Everything seems to take 10 times longer (and I still haven't got the Realtec drivers working because I can't be arsed spending so much time on this shit).

Anyway, 2026, Year of the Linux Desktop, is going well. I'm convinced it was way easier 10 years ago and my brain hasn't just totally turned to mush.