A lot of my friends asked me about the faulty detection of Linux when it comes to sound. Even on my experience, popular Linux distros like Ubuntu failed to do so. The problem starts after installing and booting Linux on a hard drive partition. Startup sound loops abnormally and it accumulates very distracting series of looping sounds when another sound is being played (i.e. event sounds or playing music files). As a remedy, I sought every possible solutions but nothing worked. I installed linux driver for the sound card, modified combinations of sound configs and even reinstalling the whole Linux. Thats why with this problem, I discarded Linux as an alternative OS. The question is, what would be the perfect Linux distro that has no "sound flaw"?

Here's the list of popular sound cards that cannot be detected properly by Linux:
Realtek HD Sound
Realtek AC'97

Drivers that failed:
ALSA

Linux s**t Distros:
Ubuntu
OpenSUSE
Gentoo
Pardus

Anyway, making a free OS does not mean full attainment of user's needs. Thanks Geek!

The sound support has always worked fine for me in linux, but I've read a ton of horror stories... and it usually only supports very basic sound options for most video cards, no surround or anything else.