Let me tell you how most attempts to create/use an Outlook account on Linux go:

Fine for the first 12 hours.

Then the next tiime you need an Outlook-based verification:

We have detected suspicious activity on your account. (Please verify using a phone number)

If you haven't been hit by that then you dual boot or somehow have sold your data to MS already.

outlook account requirement = DRM.

It's why I don't play Halo despite owning the original on disc and why Steam refund policy is fucking shit awful

I've been using Lutris, and it's been working better for me than HGL. I've had a good experience with some games on Linux compared to Windows as well. For example, Phantom Fury, when NPC characters talk to you during gameplay, there is no sound or visual representation of the characters in Windows. But Linux everything works perfectly.

I tried everything to fix it on windows but no luck.

On some laptops I am indeed dualbooting, but on others Linux is the only one.

I am unsure if I have encountered similar issues as you, do you mean when you merely try to log into your Outlook or Live mail account with a browser, from Linux?

I recall experiencing those needs to verify my MS accounts only if I e.g. go abroad and try to access my MS mail accounts from there, but that happens also on Windows. At one point I was completely locked out of my MS email accounts because MS insisted on a verification... for which I used another MS email account, which required the same... so I was in an unsolvable situation, I couldn't access any of my MS email accounts from abroad that time.

So I wisened up and don't use another MS email account as the verification account for a MS account, but instead my Gmail account that is always on my phone. That way the MS accounts can't accidentally lock me out anymore. One of the MS accounts is nowadays using the authenticator on my phone for those extra authentications so it will also work... as long as I have the phone with me abroad.

Same.
Some years ago my email provider closed and I needed to transfer my old emails to another account, the only I got working at the time was G-mail and Outlook, no other provider I could transfer via POP3? (sorry can't remember).

Long story short, after a while, got the "you cannot use this email account without phone number because save the children" security message...

I think Chromium uses pulseaudio, and thus pipewire-pulse through Pipewire. I am under the impression most things do. So technically, setting that env for latency *should* work for Chromium too. You could always test it. Run chromium in the terminal and set the env at the start. Try a high value like 85-100, and if it doesn't work you've at least eliminated one issue with your Youtube problem. Then you can start troubleshooting others, like the mysterious hardware acceleration in videos through a browser. Good luck with that.

I recommend commenting out or reverting any custom conf you did prior before trying these out. I believe however, that in one of the pipewire-pulse conf files you can also set that variable, if you can find the setting.

I think you nailed it. When pipewire was in its infancy, there were, er, issues and nobody wanted to or saw the point of using pipewire. Nowadays pipewire is the default audio server in all distros that I am aware of.

Under /usr/share/pipewire/ there is a config file pipewire-pulse.conf which says:

# PulseAudio config file for PipeWire version "1.4.6" #
#
# Copy and edit this file in /etc/pipewire for system-wide changes
# or in ~/.config/pipewire for local changes.

That's probably the file, but frankly I am unsure what is the setting I am trying to find there. If i have to guess, maybe this then (as there are only two lines with the word "latency" in the config file, unless the setting is one of those "quantum" setting lines):

stream.properties = {
#node.latency = 1024/48000

I'm Just Saying That As A Windows User,
I'll Be On Windows Till It's Dead... ~_~

Either It's Going Beyond That, Or It Stops At That...

The Only Solution I Have Is If A New OS
Comes Out To Replace Windows, But Not
To Replace Linux, & That's Where I'm At...

If An OS Doesn't' Come Out, Then My Time With
Windows Will Come To An End When I Reach
That Bridge...

Until Then I Have No Interest In Leaving...

I removed any pipewire and pulseaudio config modifications I had before and tried "export PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=85" and even 100 (checked with echo $PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC that it is set, and it didn't seem to fix it

Neither did the "node_latency" setting I had in the pipewire_pulse config file. According to Gemini AI it is just a mere suggestion to the latency and the "stream" can choose not to respect it, and it talked about some other settings in that same config file that may play a role there as well, like the "quantum" setting.

Oh well, back to square one. So far it seemed the pipewire.comf quantum and Hz settings changes had at least some positive effect, maybe they still need to be bumped up a bit more to get completely rid of the audio crackling.

Hm.

After you did "export PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=85" in a terminal session, did you run the app from that same terminal? Because the export does not persist in another session.

What are you using to run your games? Lutris? Repo or Flatpak?

If Lutris repo, there is a setting called "Reduce audio latency", toggle it. It is the same as PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60, but it will do it for you for running the game, so you don't have to learn how to do it. Try that maybe.

If not and you haven't tried it yet, then launch the app from the terminal with the env variable set before it.

PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=100 lutris

for example.

If those don't work, then the crackling might be unrelated to the audio backend. You could circumvent pipewire/pulse and just use plain ALSA in Wine to verify. Do this on your Wine prefix:

winetricks -q sound=alsa

and see if the crackling persists.

If that doesn't work either, then the problem is instead probably somewhere with the USB soundcard settings. Could be the USB power saving settings on Linux, and so on. If you have another sound card, try that, like the motherboard one, to see.

Ok I didn't realize that, I thought it is system-wide setting. So I set the env variable within a console window and started DD from a desktop shortcut.

DD was originally installed with Lutris (repo version I think).

I guess I need to experiment with it more. With the pipewire.conf changes I made (pumped up "quantum min" to 1024 which was somewhere considered as the maximum value you should even try) and at least the audio crackling comes now quite seldom, and usually also goes away pretty quickly.

Yes it may be also the USB speakers (Logitech V20) which may be the culprit because they are very old and probably don't have much of "audio processing power" if that matters, but then they have always worked 100% in Windows, and also in Linux pre-pipewire I think. I really like the speakers, I have three pairs of them (bought two extra pairs when I saw some people selling the secondhand cheaply) because for USB-powered small speakers that you can easily carry in your laptop bag, they have pretty good sound quality.

You can still play your games on Windows 10 until they come out with some API that requires Win11 to run on it. It was the same with Win7 until DX12 became the norm for most games.