Good suggestion, unfortunately I don’t have an extra empty drive. For the time being I’m mitigiating the audio issue with the fix suggested by the top comment (higher min-quantum), hopefully PoP 24 ships with “better” defaults and fixes this out of the box!
I’m new to Linux (and very inexperienced, since PoP just worked out of the box until now), so I can’t relate haha though apparently the audio crackling is due to the CPU not being fast enough to do everything it’s required to, and when it starts lagging behind too much and can’t respect the min-quantum value anymore, the weird audio issue shows up.
setting min-quantum to a higher value (PoP ships with 32 min, I set it to 256) mitigates the issue a lot
HW is in top shape, so no issues there. Pipewire is the deafult on PoP.
As the top comment suggested, the issue is in the min-quantum value being too low. Not a HW issue per se, it’s just that the CPU can’t keep up.
Thanks though!
It’s not a laptop so I don’t have power saving options that would affect performance (I only see automatic suspend and screen inactivity).
I tried performance power mode, but that did nothing for crackling. The only thing that works is setting the min-quantum value like the top comment suggested. Thanks!
Kernel is 6.17.4, not the latest but not that outdated I think. I’m. not jumping onto the beta since the full release is just a few days away, in the meantime I’ll make do with the workaround for the audio issue. Thanks!
Thanks for the reply and sorry it took me so long to get back to you.
Your solution works and 256 is enough to get rid of basically all cracklings, thank you!
yes, PSU is enough: it’s a 550W unit (quality one) and GPU specsheet suggests 450W; draw is similar to the old card’s (178W vs. ~165W)
No, my audio output comes directly from the motherboard
I can also vouch for PoP_OS!, get the .iso with baked-in nVidia drivers and you will have no problems. The biggest issue I’ve had so far is that sometimes, after updating graphics drivers, FPS get stuck at like ~10 and I need to reboot. But happens rarely, and it takes ten seconds to fix
A bit less recent, 25.1.5