@nikgnomic, it has taken me a few days…but, first, I want you to know that I have really appreciated your willingness to help. You’ve been great and nothing about my thinking at this point re: Linux suggests any lack of support here.
Since your last post, however, I have even tried Ubuntu (for perhaps the max # of proprietary drivers and such) and Debian (via MX Linux, which has a reputation of being “hardware friendly”) and have messed around with the alsamixer settings and roped 4 coworkers into being on the receiving end of Slack video calls (when they all had other things to do)…and between the 3 distros, nothing is working to produce anything out of my internal mike (on the receiving end) other than hiss. Meanwhile, when it came time to have Microsoft Teams and GoToMeeting sessions this week with clients, I simply booted the same device into Windows 10 and participated without any difficulty.
So, at this point, I’m done with it. I spent more than a year with Linux when my only business needs for the OS was email and the most MS Office-compatible software I could find. But with COVID-19 as the driver behind so much business communication moving to Zoom, Slack, GoToMeeting, etc, it has really put a bright light on an area where Linux still stumbles in providing a seamless migration from Windows. Connecting your laptop’s internal mic to the OS still seems pretty fundamental to me and to find stuff not installed by default (and not announced as such), and all kinds of reports to pull and files to create and lines of text to edit to try to make it happen…that’s just craziness. For something of a hobbyist, maybe not. But for a casual user, very much so.