What distribution, DE, browser, etc? Is hardware acceleration enabled? Do you have multiple audio outputs simultaneously enabled?
A bit more detail would be helpful
this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2025
37 points (100.0% liked)
Linux
63651 readers
631 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
Sorry, I have a linuxmint wiith KDE plasma installed. I'll check on the other things
Audio from low priority processes is expected to stutter under high CPU load. I experience this a lot when playing music while compiling programs.
It's kinda not supposed to happen if your setup is correct.
Most likely reason is too short buffer. And on high CPU load it's just getting overrun. There are legitimate ways to mitigate it in pipewire. And even manage some rt prio things. Arch wiki and pipewire docs should have comprehensive info on how to properly setup things. It can be bit complicated because different sources can have different quantum values. So some can stutter and some not, but it should be all configurable. Pipewire is very good in that regard, just sad I don't see any good tools to manage these values w/o creating/editing configs, so people don't jump into this rabbit hole of research.
Please note that defaults on pipewire should not stutter regularly with proper interface, my main audio interface performs way above what pipewire set by default. But I did used different interfaces and some do struggle with default quantum values.
Yeah you can mitigate it. Doesn’t change the fact that if you have no CPU time available, the audio is not getting played.
none of these applications require particularly low latency, so if you're on Pipewire, you can increase both min, max and default quantum to something like [1024, 4096]. i have to do this on my N100 laptop and it helps a lot.
pw-top tells you which app uses which quantum too, and often times, your machine will slightly struggle with apps that suddenly demand lower quantums and cause stuttering. increasing the min quantum fixes this issue.
had a similar issue on my desktop, i had to disable onboard audio, even though it wasn't in use or even recognized
Does it stutter if you open Pavucontrol? I've seen a couple setups where Pipewire stutters when pipewire-pulse is used, as does Pavucontrol.
(In some setups this only happened when the volume indicator is enabled in Pavucontrol and disappeared when it was switched off.)
Run pw-top while you’re having the issue and post the output.
It’s probably a bad default setting that’s setting the buffer/quantum incorrectly.
Did you/your distro set up realtime ulimits correctly such that pw can acquire rt priority?