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PipeWire is great.
I remember a lot of people kicking up a fuss about it years ago saying it's a mess and we should stick to PulseAudio or routing audio to ALSA, but personally for me it's been great, far less troublesome than previous solutions, and the vast majority seem to agree.
The pain points were short-lived and now we're reaping the benefits of having a modernised, easier to maintain, less janky system. Credit to the devs, and to the distros who pushed it.
There was a similar fuss when distros moved from alsa to pulse.
Having been a linux user around the time of both rollouts I've had a way better time with pipewire. We've come a long way since OG pulseaudio
I seem to remember canonical rushing pulse into an LTS before it was actually ready. Not the first time they've done that either.
I remember a lot of people kicking up a fuss about it years ago saying it’s a mess
I remember the same type of discussion when PulseAudio was new, nearly 20 years ago. It's just growing pains. I hopped on board with PulseAudio ASAP back then, and yeah, it was kind of a mess but it did what I needed, and the alternatives did not.
I don't recall having any audio issues in recent years, either on PulseAudio OR PipeWire. But then again, I'm still not running Wayland (I plan to...soon™) and this is the first I've heard of issues with Flatpak (maybe I've been using PipeWire longer than I've been using Flatpak; can't recall).
Btw, Analog out is always at 30db with step 2 of 100 or so. How do i set that one port to be less loud by default, in pipewire?
pipewire simply eliminated all the quirks from my use case.
the transition was annoying, but i don't even think about how bad linux audio used to be anymore.
wish the transition to wayland was going this well.
With Wayland it was either break everything and improve, progress, and innovate over time with something actually maintainable & expandable,
Or... make x11\Xorg 2.0 and have to rewrite the entire stack yet again in only a few years.
And it was the X devs who made the choice.
The transition for me was "install Pipewire and its pulseaudio compatibility package, remove pulseaudio, reboot."
There are a couple of quirks (updating Apparmor rules makes KDE think I've reattached all my audio devices), but it's mostly pretty smooth.
I waited for canonical to enable it by default. The annoying part for me was undoing the workarounds PulseAudio needed to do what I wanted.
Pipewire: works.
Pulseaudio: worksn't.
Really, it's as simple as that. Pulseaudio tried to be the systemd of sound and ~~failed~~ succeeded pretty horribly. Even its packaging was horrible, back when it was first put into Fedora and I tried uninstalling, it threatened taking down Libreoffice and Gedit with it.
back when it was first put into Fedora and I tried uninstalling, it threatened taking down Libreoffice and Gedit with it.
I did this back when I was a newbie and somehow destroyed either the display server or some other part of the GUI. Sound issues have made me nervous ever since.
Pulseaudio is NOT a failure lol
ALSA, Esound, OSS etc were always conflicting pre-pulseaudio. Sometimes you'd get sound, you'd always have to screw around with the sound server settings in different apps between KDE and Gnome apps, and gaming was a disaster. Even just using XMMS2 was a pain with Netscape/Firefox
It was a huge step forward, even with initial teething problems.
The only thing it didn't solve was low latency (for music production), and that's really the huge advantage of Pipewire. It did take a while to get there though..
In Xfree86 days, Linux wouldn't have had a future if PulseAudio wasn't released. It was one of those critical elements (along with Compiz, XrandR, DRI, Udev, PackageKit and Steam) which actually made Linux competitive against OSX and Windows at the time
I don't know what universe were you living in, but I remember history vastly differently. No app I ever used ever had problems with ALSA, not even gaming. XMMS or XMMS2 (or Audacious even back then when it was kinda starting) never had issues with Firefox. Only when PA was introduced I started losing audio on various apps, losing volume control, or in a few cases apps would cease listing ALSA as a possible audio output while PA was installed.
I killed PA on my machines hard and never had any issues again, and things pretty much only improved once Pipewire arrived other than having to change one (1) configuration file, and it was properly documented.
Pipewire: works.
Does it have jack support? I have a network sound server and I use both linux and windows clients. I solved windows clients with the jack plugin.
Pipewire's got fantastic JACK support. You can even run standard JACK control GUI's like Carla on top of it and expect them to work just like they would on regular JACK
Can I authenticate clients with the cookie thing?
I do still have some problems with freewheeling. Ardour always crashes on exports when using the Jack interface, but everything works over the Pulseaudio interface. It might be an Ardour thing, but it doesn't occur when actually running Jack. So something is actually different with Pipewire.
IIRC wasn't Pulseaudio and systemd made by the same person?
No idea if that's the case but they certainly seem to have been made with the same mentality. FOSS has for a while suffered of what I call the "Icaza pest", trying to bring the Microsoft way of design and programming into Linux. The results and troubles this causes abound, considering eg.: the fart that has been Gnome themes since 3.x, or the Gnome posturing back in the day that "users have no right to change their settings" when modernization of Gnome-terminal, and how it'd interact with stuff like screen and dtach, were discused.
PipeWire wins in the feature-set game, which is why it is being preferred over PulseAudio.
According to the inventor of PipeWire, this is the wrong perspective to take. PipeWire is preferred over PulseAudio as a server, clients (apps) should continue to use the PulseAudio/JACK APIs because the PipeWire API is not designed for general use (it's designed for things like pipewire-pulse and pipewire-jack).
So the middleware stays the same but the underlying server changes? That's an amazing strategy I wish Wayland did this instead of breaking damn near everything with it's strange restrictions on behavior and overlays
The thing with Wayland and X11 is: this couldn't really be done because of how fundamentally ~~broken~~ incompatible X11 is (and there is XWayland for most clients that mostly works)
That's what xwayland is.
Apps can talk to xwayland with the x11 protocol but instead of an X server rendering it, your Wayland compositor renders it.
The restrictions come from the fact that those x11 behaviours are exactly things the industry has decided are a bad idea and should be replaced.
Yeah it's kinda the opposite of "New interface, old implementation."
Which I learned from https://henrikwarne.com/2024/01/10/tidy-first/
But it was the X protocol that needed to be replaced.
And it hasn't done that because no one is going to replace it a good but old pipe with a few issues with a pipe with a massive hole in it "by design"
As someone who occasionally dabbles in music production on Linux, I love that Pipewire lets me run JACK and Pulseaudio apps side-by-side without having to jump through hoops.
Pipewire was honestly the most pain-free introduction of a new audio technology on Linux; it was a nice change of pace.
Would love to use it, it has the incorrect channel map for my surround sound system which apparently cannot be changed like it can in pulse? After that gets sorted then sure.
my system sets the wrong bitrate for a device but I was able to configure it, you may want to browse the wireplumber wiki and see if its config options can meet your use case
That's a good tip, it probably can but I'll need a bit of learning to figure it out. The Linux audio situation is a hell of a learning curve sometimes.
I always had trouble with the sound on video calls with PulseAudio. Since I've switched to Pipewire, everything has been smooth.
I miss the pulseaudio restart command.
Sometimes my 3.5mm aux isn't detected in pipewire until I reboot.
pulseaudio -r used to do the trick iirc
On my distro (debian) I can use systemctl --user restart pipewire.service.
This is just generally how you should restart most things on systemd systems.
Thank you, I added the command to my Linux Journal,
Your post motivated me to do some more trials and it ended up that my greetd greeter was locking up the audio sink.
So I made sure to add a command after the greeter exits killall -u greeter and the sink finally passed correctly to the logged in user just fine after that.
In reviewing the arch wiki some more too I've installed wire plumber session manager for pipewire, I am still a little confused about it's function and relation to pipewire but maybe that has helped too?
Cheers :)
I've been using Pipewire for a while, it was great because I could use my Bluetooth headset with a better audio Codec than in Pulseaudio. Unfortunately, my headset stopped working one day suddenly with Pipewire. (maybe after a dist-upgrade?) No amount of disconnecting, unbonding etc. would work. Went back to Pulseaudio as a sound server. Sad.
Neither Pulseaudio nor Pipewire remember to use by screen speakers (hdmi) as default, though. It always switches back to the internal sound card.