Existing laptops provide that higher level of abstraction, and audio quality is uniformly garbage. It’s likely much easier for the open source people to do the

Existing laptops provide that higher level of abstraction, and audio quality is uniformly garbage. It’s likely much easier for the open source people to do the work to deal with the underlying physics once, and then port it to all hardware. The laptop models are all essentially the same (they have a few electromagnets, cones and a few sounding boards). Each one has different parameters in their mostly-linear response curves. My guess is that after the first few models work well all the others will rapidly fall into line. Something similar happened with printers 20 years ago. The open source stack implemented state of the art dithering and font hinting once and ended up producing higher quality output than the commercial windows drivers for the same printers.