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

[Slartifartblast]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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]

4) Can this allow me to spawn a 9999x9999 resolution session and connect to it?

why you need a 9999x9999 resolution in your session?

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

It's more "sponsor" than "govern". It's not like Red Hat has this massive return of their investment (paying a couple dudes for Pipewire for example), given that they mostly sell an OS for servers and services connected to it anyway.

I'm strongly suspecting that these people would still be working on these things even on their own, although much more slowly as it's not their day job.

[kpedersen]

why you need a 9999x9999 resolution in your session?

I likely wont. It is more to check that the Wayland / PipeWire stuff is not restricted by the max resolution of the server's GPU.

given that they mostly sell an OS for servers and services connected to it anyway.

I personally am a little surprised they aren't committing a little more resources to remote server UI tech since it is kind of their core thing (even so far as to recommending installing RHEL8 via VNC rather than ssh / serial in their documentation).

[muncrief]

In what context? ...and define "simple. unified, customized, cascading".

...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.)

Then, you can right-click it and choose "Application Menu Settings..." to adjust "unified" and "simple".

Finally, you can right-click and choose "Edit Applications..." and you'll get a menu editor for "customized".

Thank you for the information. And I did try that, and many other things along the way for other components. However I was unable to define transparencies for the menus, task bar, etc., which was a bit surprising since over the years KDE has advertised itself as being supremely customizable. But I discovered that some of the simple things I do in XFCE require a lot of custom artwork and theme building in KDE. Of course I tried many of the pre-built KDE themes, hoping to customize them, but I couldn't find any I even began to like.

But, to be fair, I really like blue, and abhor all dark themes, so there really isn't much pre-built, for KDE or Gnome, that I like. Which is why I spent so much time over the years building my own custom GTK2/GTK3 theme for XFCE.

And like I said, I really like simple and direct desktops, but KDE was an endless stream of pop-ups and notifications and other stuff that I find unnecessary and bothersome. Of course I could have spent a lot of time turning all those blingy things off, and building a custom theme for KDE, but then I might as well stick with XFCE. However I know many people love that kind of stuff, including my son, so I'm glad KDE and Gnome are available for those with different tastes and styles.