PipeWire Is In Increasingly Great Shape - Ready For More User Testing

[starshipeleven]

Hmm, I remember the early days of pulseaudio, I just hope it isn't pulseaudio 2 bugfest.

You mean ALSA bugfest electric boogaloo? Most crap was actually in ALSA, PulseAudio just put the whole thing under stress, and ALSA blew up in its face.
That's all fixed by now, the transition should be much smoother.

I'm sure Ubuntu will ship a broken pipewire in a LTS so we will still get shelllshocked people that will swear up and down that it's bad and should be burned at the stake and that the first thing they do is uninstall it and use ALSA and claim that since ALSA can mix multiple sources already (which is true) there is no point for pipewire just like there was no point for pulseaudio

[starshipeleven]

JACK sink? Does this mean being able to output PipeWire to JACK?

No, it's explained like garbage so you are right to be confused.

It actually means Pipewire can create a JACK audio sink interface for running applications that need JACK to work. All this without having JACK installed, of course.

Pipewire is supposed to replace both Pulseaudio and JACK so it has to provide the same interfaces to userspace.

[pkunk]

I have great hope for PipeWire but after spending a few days dedicated to trying to get it to work on Arch recently I had to surrender to defeat.

Something like:

• systemctl --global mask pulseaudio.service
• pacman -S pipewire-pulse
• create /etc/ld.so.conf.d/pw-pulse.conf with /usr/lib/pipewire-0.3/pulse
• add NoExtract = usr/lib/libpulse* to pacman.conf
• pacman -S libpulse
• reboot

Don't use wireplumber it currently doesn't work with the latest pipepewire.
Multilib and flatpaks will not support this setup.
It would be surprising if Bluetooth works.

[browseria]

JACK sink? Does this mean being able to output PipeWire to JACK?

From the linked blog post: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2020/...r-update-2020/

...PipeWire is being done with the aim of being ABI compatible with ALSA, PulseAudio and JACK,
meaning that PulseAudio and Jack apps should just keep working on top of Pipewire
without the need for rewrites (and with the same low latency for JACK apps).

Later on the article shows how to replace PA and JACK with PipeWire...the author also states that he's been running his system with Pipewire as the only sound server for "a while now" and testing with a number of JACK-only applications...hope that clears it up.

[jntesteves]

Hmm, I remember the early days of pulseaudio, I just hope it isn't pulseaudio 2 bugfest.

Thanks to PulseAudio development most of the early problems faced by PA are now solved for PipeWire. They weren't PA problems, they were Linux problems.

[skeevy420]

Hmm, I remember the early days of pulseaudio, I just hope it isn't pulseaudio 2 bugfest.

This is the Internet so it should be Pulseaudio 2 Electric Bugfestaloo

But, yeah, I agree and hope this won't be a repeat because Pulseaudio still has a bad reputation from those days.

[Slartifartblast]

Hmm, I remember the early days of pulseaudio, I just hope it isn't pulseaudio 2 bugfest.

[kpedersen]

I am quite keen on seeing at least some work on remote computing (not everything is a consumer tablet after all!)

I do have a few queries I don't know if anyone has any answers to or knowledge about. The details seem to be fairly light and the development is still very early?

1) Is this only a Gnome 3 feature or will it be possible to integrate with popular compositors like Sway and Weston?
2) Can this work on a headless server (with no GPU)?
3) Can this allow 5 users to each run their own desktop session simultaneously?
4) Can this allow me to spawn a 9999x9999 resolution session and connect to it?

Hopefully all of these are a 'yes'. Then we might finally have a suitable alternative to the X11 based Xvnc.

So the usual stuff. Red Hat’s desktop team doing 99% of the work.

You kind of have to expect that when communities allow commercial companies to take control and "govern" the direction of projects

[skeevy420]

...because, for the main launcher menu, in KDE, you can get a "cascading" launcher menu by choosing Unlock Widgets from the panel menu, then right-clicking the default launcher and choosing Alternatives, then choosing "Application Menu". (ie. It's a different widget. "Alternatives" is an easy way to swap between widgets which serve the same role without manually deleting one then adding the other.)

I call that "Step 1" after a fresh KDE install. Never been much of a fan of those smart start menus.

[skeevy420]

Which of course is one of the wonderful things about Linux. If you have the interest and patience to learn you can literally make it anything you want.

Amen to that.