Like the title says, I have the Sound Blaster X-Fi HD external USB sound card. I'm having a heck of a time getting it to work in Linux Mint. Would Ubuntu Studio be better? Who knows? I really need a dedicated Linux computer, but am on limited expenses and this is the sound card I have to use. I really need audio so that I can hear the YouTube and other Linux video tutorials, as well as the Laravel tutorials I'm trying to learn. I also have a Mac, but would MUCH PREFER to take the tutorials on the machine (Linux) that I'll be using the software on. Thank you all in advance for your help!

It's really up to the manufacturer of the device if they decide to create a Linux driver for it.

In general - you can always test a pile of Linux distros and see if you hit one that happens to work with that specific sound card. You can use Ventoy to create a bootable usb stick that contains multiple iso files.

However - I recommend you to search for the particular sound card online, you should be able to find other people asking the same and thereby have an opinion if you want to use your time testing a lot of distros.

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I have USB sound and I've had problems back in the mists of time, but not these days. You need to do a systematic check like this:

1. See if there is a sound configuration tool: a sound icon on the panel, a sound entry in any general configuration tool, a reference to sound in the menu.

2. If nothing there helps, you may have to do things manually. You might need special permission, so get it just in case. Run the command groups in a terminal to see if you belong to the audio group. If you don't, then join it with the command
sudo usermod -aG audio $LOGNAME’

3. Run the command aplay -l to get a list of devices and their id numbers. On my system I have 3 listed, and the USB device is card 1. The normal default is card 0. You can fix the problem manually by creating a file .asoundrc in the home directory with the 3 lines
defaults.pcm.card 1
defaults.pcm.device 0
defaults.ctl.card 1
Then log out and in again.

4. If that fails, then check that your kernel actually has the appropriate module loaded with the command cat /proc/asound/modules and you should have snd_usb_audio. If you haven't got it, get it from your distro.

5. If all else fails, block the sound modules you have and don't want by editing /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf to make entries like
blacklist snd_cmipci
Then remove .asoundrc if you created it (vital) and reboot.
defaults.ctl.card 1

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Generally X-Fi does not work properly in linux (they're honestly fairly touchy even in Windows, especially 'new' (Vista and later) Windows) - it's been a while since I've followed the Creative hardware more closely, but I believe that specific box was one of their attempts at 'audiophile sound' that was quickly abandoned even on Windows, in favor of their new chipset (SoundCore), which does work properly in linux (and is more stable in Windows). I may be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure this device is not properly class-compliant (they had a whole series of 'USB soundcards' that were like this). Doesn't this machine have onboard audio of some sort that you can use? Or go pick up a cheap class-compliant USB Audio device and use that.

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Some distro's have unique drivers but the kernel that is shipped tends to be similar across all mainstream distro's.

The chipset in that audio device is what tends to be searched for in kernel source.

If the OEM has a specific driver then yes it helps.

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=304728

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