I made the full plunge into Linux a week or so ago. No more VM's no more Windows on my main machine. I was using a Sound Blaster ZX but it has 0 support for Linux and I have had 0 luck getting it to work. The use case is purely for music and movies, I have a nice set of Sennheiser headphones that don't sound very good without an amp. My on board audio works fine but I am using that for my cheap speakers when I don't use my headphones.
The only thing I would like is it to come in under $100 Canadian, this will be tricky given our recent drop in the dollar.
I just compiled 4.1 last night (it actually fixed a couple errors that flashed during boot) but I've been wary of trying a release candidate as I don't want to break my OS this early in the game. Specially when I'm not 100% comfortable using grub to do recovery. I noticed that some had luck editing the 64 bit kernel as of 3.19 but the microphone port did not work. I definitely plan to hold onto the card but people have been begging Creative for Linux support for 5 years with no luck.
I will give 4.4 a shot and see how it goes. I need to learn Grub at one point or another, I just got to the point where I am comfortable with bash and editing configs with nano so I guess Grub would be the next step. Still hoping someone has experience with a compatible DAC that is of good quality but for now this seems my best shot.
Howdy Phyrce, I have a pair of DT 990's that need an amp to sound decent and I didn't want to spend more than ~ $100. I ended up going with the NuForce uDAC 3 from amazon. Looks like they are hovering at around $160 Canadian. But I can confirm it works well with debian distros with no troubleshooting.
Thanks for the recommendation, I actually was about to buy a Teac HA-P50. It seemed useful if i wanted to use it for portability. Because of where i work i could pick it up for slightly over $200 Canadian.