Audigy 2s and Live!s work fine, I've used them lots. The driver is mature & well supported.

I know that but is the RX considered part of the Live and Audigy 2 family enough to work fine with the drivers under Linux?

Most ALSA sound drivers seem to work by chipset & not card manufacturer ID or whatever. If it's not an obscure / incompatible / cynical Dell gimped version of the EMU10k1 I'm guessing it would work.

If you already have the card just boot from a LiveCD and try it; the drivers should be included on any live distro. KXStudio does not include PulseAudio if you want to try a strict ALSA-only implementation.

I have the Dell gimped SB0220. Works fine. 😀

I'm going to keep my eye on the RX then, maybe snag one if there's ever a sale on those. Been wanting to get a EMU10k1 chipset on this system for a long time now.

Well, I haven't tried it myself but linux-hardware-guide has this to say:

The Creative Sound Blaster Audigy RX (model ID SB1550) is a PCI Express sound card, which is automatically recognized under Linu […]
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The Creative Sound Blaster Audigy RX (model ID SB1550) is a PCI Express sound card, which is automatically recognized under Linux:

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1lspci -nnv
21 05:00.0 Multimedia audio controller [0401]: Creative Labs SB0400 Audigy2 Value [1102:0008]
32 Subsystem: Creative Labs Device [1102:1024]
43 Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 16
54 I/O ports at dc00 [size=64]
65 Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 2
76 Kernel driver in use: snd_emu10k1
87 Kernel modules: snd_emu10k1

The card is fully supported by the snd_emu10k1 Linux driver, which loads automatically

...which seems to imply it behaves as an Audigy 2. I'm currently using an Audigy 2 in two different machines (one ZS, one standard) and can confirm the ALSA driver works fine.

(I did have one specific issue with the KDE/Gstreamer subsystem prioritizing the Intel HDA HDMI-audio over any of the analog outs on the Sound Blaster but you 'should' be able to solve that by disabling the onboard sound. I solved it by switching to a Cinnamon-based distro. Just a caveat.)

This link has info the audigy rx in linux Set Up Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 & Audigy Rx in Slackware

Wonderful this is all the information I needed, thanks everyone!

I'm definitely going to pick up one of these in the future.