Actually, I've got a couple of things that flaked out on me in the last year or so. This was with Fedora 17, on a Lenovo Thinkpad x230 laptop, and Intel video.

Actually, I've got a couple of things that flaked out on me in the last year or so. This was with Fedora 17, on a Lenovo Thinkpad x230 laptop, and Intel video. At first I put Ubuntu on it, but it wouldn't reliably survive suspend/resume, and sometimes X11 would lock up (this is because the chipset used in this laptop was band new at the time, and driver support was still a bit flaky). So I put Fedora 17 on it, and got a bit better luck. However, after a few automatic updates, I started to get really weird sound issues. When playing videos with VLC, I would get a buzzing sound (like a broken speaker) for the first minute or so, then it would clear up -- this only happened sometimes, after a suspend / resume. Reverting to an earlier kernel fixed it, but also I couldn't duplicate the issue with any other audio program -- just VLC. Eventually (after a couple months), the various libraries, software components, and kernel versions stabilized on this hardware, and now suspend/resume, audio, etc are all flawless. But I know I'm probably in for some pain next time I upgrade hardware (unless I get last years model). Second problem -- I picked up a generic 7.1 USB audio device. The center channel and subwoofer are reversed. I can't figure out how to re-assign the audio channels through the driver (I think there is some combination of Alsa and Pulse config file tweaks, but haven't got them to work yet). Ideally I'd like to pass some parameters to the kernel module for the sound device to swap channels. I looked at the source code, saw there was a spot where I can add the chipset in the "quirks" table, but couldn't find the data structures that assign audio output to specific channels. I'll probably end up jumping on one of the kernel dev mailing lists to figure that part out when I get time. Meanwhile, I just made an adapter to swap the channels (both the center speaker and sub-woofer come out of the same audio jack on the sound device).