PipeWire Is Still On Track For One Day Being A Drop-In Replacement To PulseAudio

[HadrienG]

1.) Red Hat? if im not wrong PA was available on Arch and Gentoo in some form before Red Hat and how the frack exactly can Red Hat force-push something into other distros? you mean gnome(which had plans to use it way before fedora board would even considered it)? reptilians that took over the government?

No conspiracy theory here, but maybe a few logical shortcuts. Let me make the full thought process more explicit:

PulseAudio comes from Lennart Poettering, who works for Red Hat. Considering the amount of time he can spend on his OSS projects, he seems paid to do it. Companies rarely pay people to do stuff without monitoring what they do and approving it (though it happens). Therefore, Red Hat must be aware of Poettering's various work, including Pulse Audio, and approve of it. By doing so, they take responsibility for it, which is why my blaming of Red Hat for Lennart Poettering's work is reasonable.

Poettering's work (not just PA) is systematically merged in by Linux distributions in a half-baked form, breaking everyone's systems. Some of these Linux distributions have competent package maintainers and very elaborate QA systems in place to prevent regressions, therefore this cannot happen by accident. Well, it could have happened by accident once, but when it happens every single time Poettering releases a new piece of software, it starts to be a pattern, which distributions should be able to learn from and adapt to (by being more conservative about any software coming from that source, testing it more carefully and demanding stronger quality guarantees before integration).

At this point, we have established that some Linux distributions merge in broken code, being fully aware that it is broken. This is not a logical behavior from a technical point of view, therefore there has to be some kind of non-technical rationale behind it. When broken software is used for non-technical reasons, the two most common explanations are backwards compatibility and politics. Backwards compatibility does not apply here, but Red Hat are one of the most powerful companies in the Linux ecosystem, which makes the politics explanation highly credible. Hence my conclusion that Red Hat must be using their political influence in order to pressure other distributions into integrating Poettering's broken code, knowing well that it is broken.

You are correct that one of the things that give political power to Red Hat is that they own many core developers of GNOME. This could be the way through which they managed to coerce the other distributions: use this broken product from Poettering or you won't get GNOME updates from us anymore.