The fix, merged this week for Sunday’s 7.1-rc2 release, uses a DMI quirk by Igalia developer Guilherme Piccoli in the AMD ACP driver.
It addresses a two-year regression triggered by an ACP machine-driver change interacting badly with the Steam Deck OLED audio topology file.
The upstream patch avoids breaking other devices, may be backported to stable kernels, and helps users running mainline Linux, where missing audio also affected some games.
Why did it take two years to fix Steam Deck OLED audio in Linux, and could future devices face similar long waits for support?
How might other operating systems solve audio regressions differently, and what can Linux learn to improve out-of-the-box hardware support?