Classic PulseAudio or the new Pipewire? What's the difference? What's the buzz about Pipewire? Learn in this explainer.
  • nintendiator@feddit.cl
    ·
    7 months ago

    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.

      • nintendiator@feddit.cl
        ·
        7 months ago

        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.

  • umbrella@lemmy.ml
    ·
    7 months ago

    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.

    • lengau@midwest.social
      ·
      7 months ago

      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.

      • umbrella@lemmy.ml
        ·
        7 months ago

        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.

  • Baggie@lemmy.zip
    ·
    7 months ago

    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.

    • Mactan@lemmy.ml
      ·
      7 months ago

      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

      • Baggie@lemmy.zip
        ·
        7 months ago

        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.

  • electricprism@lemmy.ml
    ·
    7 months ago

    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