Creative themselves have done nothing particularly 'great' for Linux, what changed is that Windows deprecated hardware-accelerated audio APIs about 15 years ago, and Creative moved to producing HDA codecs a few years after that, and SoundCore is the product of that. The older Live/Audigy/X-Fi cards do indeed 'suck' in terms of compatibility and so forth (this also applies to newer versions of Windows as well - they're basically stuck in the era of Windows 98-XP and specific DirectX APIs). Some folks have specifically gone on to make the SoundCore cards work in linux (the phoronix article mentions one of the developers responsible), and they're also one of the few PCIe soundcards (a lot of other manufactuers just ended soundcard production or went to USB-based when Windows made the switch), so aside from Asus (which are C-Media based) there's not really a lot of options on PCIe.

Thanks for the information. So it's Creative, C-Media (which I have had good experiences with) or usb?

I've heard of higher sampling rates(192Khz) with usb. Is that a regular thing?

If PCIe is the only internal option I believe this is correct. Most 'onboard audio' (which is also HDA) is Realtek codecs, but not all systems have those (or they may not work, or work well, etc). If PCI is available, VIA's Envy24 chipsets work really well too (M-Audio is probably the most popular/common option for those, but there were other OEMs that used VIA (I believe Chaintech did, for example)).

USB of course should be more or less universal to modern PCs, so that's also an option, but it requires a class compliant 'USB Audio' device (there are relatively older 'USB soundcards' that are not actually class-compliant, like a lot of the early Creative USB Sound Blasters (e.g. Extigy)).

With USB Audio Class 2.0 yes you can do all sorts of very high sample rate (even beyond 192kHz), DoP, DXD, etc - linux natively supports this for a while (I don't know which kernel brought it in, its not bleeding-edge though), as does OS X/macOS, but Windows does not, so not all devices are Class 2.0 (this is different than 'USB 2.0'). Standard 'USB Audio 1.0' is limited to 16/48; I don't know what the upper limit is for 2.0 but I've seen some devices advertise 24/352 support (!). DoP requires specific player support, and I'm not sure what on linux can play it (a quick web search found this: https://www.rollofone.com/?p=309).

On add-in soundcards (PCI and PCIe alike) the upper limit tends to be 24/96 or 24/192 depending on the device - for example I believe CMI8788 can do 24/192, and some of the VIA Envy chipsets can as well, but a lot of the Creative cards only do up to 24/96. The big 'gotcha' is that many of these are doing that in 5.1 or 7.1, as opposed to stereo-only on USB.

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