Is it a mic? Is it a speaker? No, it’s a … Well, actuallyGNOME doesn’t know either ― but the popular open-source desktop isgetting smarter atfinding out.
As previewed in mockups earlier this year , GNOME 3.20 is to present userswith adialogwindow when an audio device that it can’t identify is connected to theheadphone/microphone input jack.
The user assistive feature has been able to go from mock-up to implementation thanks, in part, to Unity developerDavid Henningsson,
Henningsson’soriginal code (and knowledge) has helped GNOME integrate the functionality into their desktop shell in a way that ‘ hould be easily implementable in other desktop environments that use libgnome-volume-control to interact with PulseAudio.’
In a blog post GNOME developer Bastien Nocera explains how it works in a little more depth:
“After a bit of to and fro, most of the sound backend functionality was merged into libgnome-volume-control , leaving just 2 entry points, one to signal that something was plugged into the jack, and another to select which type of device was plugged in, in response to the user selection.”
Nifty! If you connect a lot of different audio peripheralsto your linux device keep a beady eye out for the feature in GNOME 3.20, which ships later this year.