it used to be hard to imagining anyone wanting to work w someone as toxic as linus; but i’ve learned after my first 2 tenures at faang that developers are as tribalistic as any kardashian worshipper.

devs getting angry at each other and then rage quiting is just a sympton of a tribalistically shared belief of intellectual superiority among developers like when kardashian sisters have beef with each other and their followers attack each other for it.

so long as you’re mobile, any phone can become a mobile phone. lol

the advice is still the same: understand what arch is doing with your usb device using lsusb and udev or sysfs along with lsmod.

however, it’s confusing how this usb device fits into any of this since your initial comments suggest that you’re trying to use your pci devices to enable sound from your mac mini.

i buy from linux hardware companies and malibal was so bizarre that they’re the only ones i haven’t yet purchased from and now i know that i never will.

i’m in awe of the depth he went to, emulating a machine that was emulated on another machine that emulated linux; i lost track of the inception layers once he got to animal crossings. lol

at first i thought you wrote AUTistic expression and i was marveling at how perceptive you were and i boggled at how you figured it out. lol

i once worked at a place that had something like this and; it sounds silly; but i got a live demonstration that it was the smartest thing ever.

and you make each one geographically closer than the previous one until there’s one right next to you. lol

i call it intellectual masturbation for linux enthusiasts and i enjoy partaking. lol

this one’s fascinating if you’ve ever wondered how one cpu architecture can be emulated upon another and how memory can be managed outside of the original architecture.

then setup a super console server. lol

use lspci (lspci -nnk) & lsmod to show you what arch is doing w your realtek device.

lspci -k will show you what driver each piece of hardware is using

that would suggest that arch’s driver doesn’t get anything from your mac mini; but google says you should be using snd_hda_intel for both audio devices and that’s been around forever so i doubt it has anything to do w it.

in your shoes, my next steps would be:

1. confirm that this module is in use for both devices using lspci.
2. then confirm that your devices are capable of capturing input using a microphone. i’m presuming that you’re using audio cable w 1/8" jacks and a microphone is preferable because the people would made the driver would expect you use a microphone; but any audio device should technically work.
3. test each device independently either by temporarily disabling one at a time in bios or by temporarily disabling the module from running within arch and then test again using a microphone or other audio device.

time to setup a console server so that you don’t do that again.

do you get audio out of your speakers if you play media that’s locally stored on your main pc?

what happens if you play audio from your mac mini and use something like arecord to try to record audio coming from line in? does arch include something like pavucontrol to shows you active sound levels on your line in channel?

in your shoes, i would troubleshoot each component that makes up your audio stack, starting with your mac mini. you mentioned windows and arch, but it’s difficult to discern what hardware the windows installation is running on and which hardware the arch installation is running on and if they’re both running on the same hardware.

if windows is running on the 2nd machine’s hardware, then that first step is confirmed and now you need to find out what’s going on with your arch installation.

if arch is running on the second machine as well, then you want to confirm that it’s receiving its line in feed using something to record and play it back to you. if windows is running on the same hardware as arch, then your problem is probably here and using something like alsa recorder (assuming that’s still a thing) would tell you that it is.

when i did something like this circa 2002, i had to setup something they called a channel passthrough at the time using alsa. we have pulseaudio nowadays, but i’m betting that the same technique will still work.

same here; but i depend on it heavily and wouldn’t have survive if it weren’t for google searches showing me one-liners. lol

Im stuck at sub-100-megabit Wi-Fi speeds if I use Intel Linux driver; but their Windows driver doesn’t have any such restriction, so I give the Windows virtual machine full control of the wireless adapter via PCI passthrough to workaround this annoying and pointless restriction.

not a concept; an actual, physical server that i’ve been using for almost five years now.

VMs have been breached

i have automatic updating enabled to incorporate cve fixes/updates asap on all of the instances and the host server.

now that you’ve made me aware, i intend to create automated jobs to destroy & create both vm’s from an immutable golden image that are also pre-staged to capture all updates before they replace their older live and possibly compromised predecessors.

the host server is also gaped from internet access via pci passthrough dedicated to the pfsense vm; so the only entry vector, afaik, is through the pfsense firewall.

i was also wondering if an immutable distro for the host server would help with security as well and now i think i’ll do that too.

I would dump the windows stuff, if nothing else it is not future proof. Consider an AP.

i’m limited to sub-100 megabit wifi speeds without the windows vm since intel will not allow the linux driver to have gigabit speeds in ap mode. i feel like this is the weakest part of the entire design and i was hoping someone had a better idea that didn’t require AP purchase. all of the AP’s i’ve purchased in the past eventually lost support from their manufacturers and they became compromise-able anyways so it’s less future proof imo; whereas i plan on keeping this server running for atleast another decade and support is virtually guaranteed to be never ending.

also: i haven’t yet encountered an AP that is capable of providing all of the features that i currently use. ie ad blocking; personal vpn; web hosting; and cloud-like internet accessible storage via ssh tunnel (in addition to others). purchasing a dedicated AP would effectively deny myself these capabilties and i would have pay $$$ for the privilege.

Backup consider a hot mount sata enclosure. One can then do swapable high speed backups. I would want off line and off site backups.

it feels silly to to me to purchase hardware to duplicate the same capability that i already have and that cloud like internet accessible storage is reason why offline backups don’t work for me, but i can see the wisdom of having gapped backup duplicates nonetheless; so i’ll figure out a way to incorporate it somehow.

these 3 very valid points are exactly why i asked this question and thanks for giving me this awareness.