yeah I felt this. I'm having a specific issue with my mint install that I can't figure out for the life of me and no one has any answers (or bothered to leave any comments on the forum...)
Could try the approach of posting a rant that mint can't even do what you're trying to do with it, therefore it sucks and anyone that likes it is wrong and a bad person and it's easier to just deal with Windows.
edit: I love y'all for helping me so much but I somehow broke tf out of my mint install on the flash drive. I have no idea how. it literally says "something went seriously wrong" in the BIOS and then shuts the PC off when I try to launch the mint OS. gonna do a clean install... again...
oh boy
ok so I'm running a mint cinnamon edge install on my laptop, booted off a flash drive for now. currently, my biggest issue is the mic. Presently, whenever I try to use my mic, it instead takes whatever audio output my system is currently producing (be that music from YouTube or system sounds) and thinks that that is the input. it does not however, pick up anything with my voice. this happens both with my built in laptop speaker and when I connect my Bluetooth headphones and try to use the mic on those.
I've fiddled with pavucontrol settings for a while and wasn't able to fix it. it seems like it's not detecting my built in mic, saying it's unplugged or something, but that doesn't explain why I have the same issue with my headphones.
I'm thinking it has something to do with the fact that it's a live session from a flash drive instead of a full install on my PC, but I'm hesitant to do a full install without finding fixes for issues I might run into first.
if you can figure something out, that'd be incredible and I would thank you sincerely and owe you one; if not that's fine, I really don't know what I'm gonna do other than take the plunge and full install, hoping that'll fix it
I'm no linux expert, but I think that issues like that are pretty common with a flash boot - based on BIOS boot sequences or similar issues, the drive likely doesn't have as many permissions or permissions in the right order as a ssd would. As an intermediary step, you could try partitioning your drive first then doing a full install on a small partition.
Currently have windows booted to partition my drive and make space for a full Linux install, so I can't do that command right away. here's an inxi -Fxz command though from before, does this help any?
This laptop seems to use ALC236, which seems to have a lot of problem on linux. If you search on the web, people seems to have different issues with different fixes on various laptop with ALC236. I'm not quite sure what's the issue in your case, but searching for "ALC236" linux mic might yield some relevant results, such as this one. Most solutions are probably not applicable unless you install linux permanently on your disk first though.
I only just realized my previous comment formatted like total ass, I'm so sorry. I'll check it out, but it seems like I fucked up the Linux install somehow, to the point where it says "something went seriously wrong" in the BIOS before shutting my PC off. I have no idea what I did wrong since I didn't even touch the flash drive it was on.