Audacity works fine by me.
I use PulseAudio and I have alsa-utils installed (although I don't think it's
required).

If you start Audacity from a shell, is there valuable output you can read there?

I also just noticed that Audacity has a `--test` flag for self-diagnosis.  Maybe
you could try

  audacity --test

and see if you can learn anything relevant.

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/