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

[finalzone]

PulseAudio still sucks balls, even today. JACK worked okay, but like others said, it's not too useful without a pre-emptive kernel. Barring that, I just want a pure ALSA system, as that seems to work great.

PulseAudio was one of the reasons why I stopped using Red Hat / Fedora and never went back.

Without pulseaudio doing the heavy lifting, ALSA would be in a terrible mess circa 2000 and none of users would access functions like Bluetooth support, audio USB and more in a modern environment. Too bad you missed a lot as pulseaudio drastically improved since then.
Pipewire got a solid start now that pulseaudio served its purpose exposing and fix ALSA drivers bugs which were overdue.

[pal666]

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

community is free to provide its own solution. where is it?

[pal666]

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

you remember the early days of pulseaudio in ubuntu. ubuntu is capable of making bugfest of anything. there was no pulseaudio bugfest in fedora

[pal666]

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

they do https://fleet-commander.org/

[ssokolow]

I'm just hoping that, when I upgrade from Kubuntu 16.04 LTS to 20.04 LTS, I'll finally be able to remove all the PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 launcher wrappers I had to put on my games to keep the audio from breaking up.

[starshipeleven]

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).

because their servers can remain on xorg indefinitely anyway, so there is no hurry.

As I said, they are "sponsoring", and not "investing". If they were actually investing in wayland, pipewire and whatnot there wouldn't be like 5 dudes total working on them, but fifty to a hundred. RH isn't a small company.

[Mez']

I was immediately convinced by the PulseAudio project, way before it was finalized.
I liked what it wanted to bring to the table and as soon as it was usable I went for it, even with its initial issues.
I've been playing with it since the beginning for 5.1 audio and it's been working fantastic. These days, it's well integrated and it doesn't get in the way at all.
I'm not sure I understand fully what PipeWire does and might miss the point.
But, if I'm not using JACK, what is Pipewire going to bring for me that I would need it over PulseAudio? If it's just something on top of PA, can't I just keep PA only and be happy like that?

[Nocifer]

I was immediately convinced by the PulseAudio project, way before it was finalized.
I liked what it wanted to bring to the table and as soon as it was usable I went for it, even with its initial issues.
I've been playing with it since the beginning for 5.1 audio and it's been working fantasti. These days, it's well integrated and it doesn't get in the way at all.
I'm not sure I understand fully what PipeWire does and might miss the point.
But, if I'm not using JACK, what is Pipewire going to bring for me that I would need it over PulseAudio? If it's just something on top of PA, can't I just keep PA only and be happy like that?

Basically, it will allow for unifying the various Linux multimedia stacks into one multi-purpose API capable of dealing with both low-latency and who-cares-about-latency audio, as well as video. And AFAIU it will also allow for various things impossible to do on Wayland that we take for granted on X, like screen recording, media casting, remote desktop and such.

From the blog article linked in the OP:

For those still unaware PipeWire is our effort to bring together audio, video and pro-audio under Linux, creating a smooth and modern experience. Before PipeWire there was PulseAudio for consumer audio, Jack for Pro-audio and just unending pain and frustration for video.

So in other words it's Pulseaudio+Jack+GStreamer on steroids, but built from the ground up to play nicely together and with Wayland's capabilities and limitations in mind.

Also, it's a given that Pulseaudio will eventually be deprecated in favor of Pipewire, and we will only be using a compatibility layer (pipewire-pulse, i.e. like we currently use pulseaudio-alsa to do the same thing between ALSA and Pulseaudio). So yeah, you can keep using Pulseaudio if you want, but a few years down the road there won't really be any reason for you to do so - not to mention that distros will be coming with it preinstalled instead of Pulseaudio, so there won't be any hassle on your part to set it up.

(If I'm mistaken in anything, please feel free to correct me!)

[DiDiDi]

Really looking forward to getting rid of PulseAudio. The development has slowed down to a crawl - even getting a pull request adding functionality that should have been there 5 years ago reviewed/approved is hard. I mean, COME ON: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulse...e_requests/227

[pal666]

But, if I'm not using JACK, what is Pipewire going to bring for me that I would need it over PulseAudio?

video and flatpak

If it's just something on top of PA, can't I just keep PA only and be happy like that?

you can continue using pa-only apps, they'll work with pw without changes