FWIW, after experiencing the problem with the Raspberry Pi OS panel disappearing after the installation of the 4-mic array seeed-voicecard driver, I now have it working with Linux Mint’s Cinnamon desktop. I used the 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS, then updated/upgraded and then installed “cinnamon-desktop-enviroment”. After rebooting, I then tried installing the Hin Tak driver from GitHub - HinTak/seeed-voicecard-x: Detached mirror of the most-current-kernel branch of https://github.com/HinTak/seeed-voicecard which did the trick (the official ReSpeaker @ GitHub - respeaker/seeed-voicecard: 2 Mic Hat, 4 Mic Array, 6-Mic Circular Array Kit, and 4-Mic Linear Array Kit for Raspberry Pi didn’t work though).
Quite honestly though I am not impressed with the official lack of support shown by this company after all this time. Again to be honest, I would have serious doubts about buying any more of the ReSpeaker products in the future if need arose.
