I have a terrible confession: i have loads of audio issues im dealing with atm. My desktop setup basically gets confused and stops working whenever i try to switch fom headphones to speaker, and my two laptops just do not want to pair with my bluetooth headphones unless i futz with bluetoothctl every time

Anyway, tangent aside. my terrible confession is that i go to linuxmemes for tech support, someone pls help

I definitely remember having to futz with audio a looooong time ago, but honestly getting xf86config to work with my video card and monitor was much more difficult.

I think I managed to skip the ndiswrapper era. I was using Ethernet on desktops and my laptops were Macs. Nowadays my desktop has both wifi and Ethernet, and my laptops run Linux but nmtui just works.