Fedora 34 Gets Sign-Off For Trying To Default To PipeWire For Audio Needs

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on the proposal for defaulting to PipeWire with Fedora 34 due out next spring.

The proposal is for Fedora 34 to default to PipeWire in place of PulseAudio and JACK. After Red Hat has been investing in PipeWire the past several years as the audio/video stream management solution and designed to securely fit the needs of Wayland, Flatpak, and other modern Linux technologies, they feel it's ready for the limelight.

PipeWire has been available as a non-default option on Fedora for a while but now the developers feel it's ready enough to be the default in place of PulseAudio as the default audio server and even JACK for professional audio needs. Some features are missing though with PipeWire and not all feel the code is up to production standards, so we'll see if it actually makes it for Fedora 34 or is reverted pre-release.

At last week's FESCo meeting, the committee decided to approve the change for routing all audio through PipeWire. But the contingency deadline has been moved up one week prior to beta freeze. So PipeWire will need to prove itself one week quicker than it normally would have been, due to the time it will take reverting the change should it be deemed insufficient for Fedora 34 and then postponed to at least Fedora 35. By moving it up one week, it reduces the risk of delaying Fedora 34 Beta if such a revert is necessary.

More details on the Fedora PipeWire proposal via the project's Wiki.