Hi all, pretty new to the linux in general. I decided to start with Fedora on recommendation of some folks from lemmy, and it’s been fun getting everything set up for the first time (with varying levels of success.) I’m not exactly a tech or audio guy, so my terminology’s not up to snuff, so I hope you’ll bear with me.
I’m using Fedora 41 with the KDE spin.
I booted up discord last night, and ran into a pretty serious problem I’m not sure how to solve. My audio output works fine enough (though it can skip and get grainy when running multiple processes at once, something I can bear with and fix at my leisure.) My audio input, however, is a ball of snakes all on its own. There’s this ominous low humming and you can barely make out my voice, the quality is just so low. I’ve used the headset in question before, and tried a new cheap headset to make sure it wasn’t the hardware that’s busted. (tangent, my keyboard does seem to be broken as of tonight - maybe you saw my half-finished post a moment ago that I had to delete. Ctrl keys busted 
)
I panic-searched a slapdash temporary solution, installing PulseAudio. It kinda works, but I later learned that it’s an older, worse version of pipewire, which is what fedora41 seems to have made its default. A few foibles later (including accidentally uninstalling the volume mixer entirely), i’m back to where I was at the start. I’d like to make my setup work with pipewire if I can, but I’m really at a loss as to how to change my input settings, if at all. Can I get some help please?