The Story Of PipeWire & How It's Getting Ready To Handle Linux Audio + Video

[zxy_thf]

Fedora's problems with "user reluctance" have absolutely nothing to do with the tools involved. 100% of the reason why most people have given up filing bugs against ANY piece of the RedHat empire is how those bug reports are (not) handled by the team responsible for them: ignored for 3 years, then auto-closed as "this release is no longer supported".

In addition Fedora's abrt service infra has been broken for a while, and it seems nobody care about it.

[stiiixy]

Not sure where you get a "workstation" is different from a "desktop" as far as the software is concerned. The terms are interchangeable. I have a "server" acting as a development "workstation" but it's still a desktop system. The big iron notion of workstation versus desktop disappeared in practice ages ago. "Workstation" is just a computer where you do "real work", whereas back then everything else was a "toy" desktop. That is, one was running Unix and arbitrarily cost $10s of thousands of dollars while the other ran "toy" software like MSDOS. It was BS snobbery then and it's even more BS now. Before you go on about the hardware, I'll point out that there's little distinction in having an audio mixer hooked up to an Alienware "gaming PC" "desktop" and one hooked up to a 5 year old ThinkServer 4U tower beyond one having ECC RAM and the other doesn't. Gamers and any given music afficionado are just as needful for low latency audio as the film editor. No one likes to have something happen on screen one moment, then the audio catches up 500 ms to 1s later.

Snobbery regarding a dinstinction in device requirements? A level of software I don't need was forced on me and it was broken is my point, not the device. I don't need millisecond differances in audio latency to read documents, watch movies, generate invoices, create maps, learn CAD on a general purpose desktop. PA is, after many years of growing pains, stable for regular use.

I leave my server to serving, and my workstation for generating content (videos, which is where PipeWire et al will come in to use) each unladen with unneccesary (for my use cases) extra's. Those machines are all the same hardware base by the way (3200G).

So yeah, server, workstation and desktop for me.

The reason I still use the word because I worked in an environment with thousands of people we needed an easily understood differentiation between devices for the lay to comprehend. The per-device naming scheme used however was beyond all comprehension.

[schmidtbag]

I recently got a new laptop and after putting a fresh Arch+KDE install on it, I also decided for it to go all PipeWire. I don't do anything fancy with audio on my laptops so it's a good testing ground. So far, I'm experiencing no issues whatsoever. However, I don't notice it being better the PA either, but unlike a lot of people around here, I don't hate on PA like it's the worst thing that happened to Linux audio.

[pal666]

As a general user of the audio aspect of desktop linux (simple music and video usage and occassional low end game), I don't understand what this is attempting to do for me, after PulseAudio replaced something that already worked. I DO know that a recent Manjaro update completetly fucked my audio, yet thankfully a simple PulseAudio reinstall fixed that.

you don't have to understand it, it's your distro vendor's job. but you have to understand that if manjaro update breaks your system, it's manjaro's fault

[pal666]

So yeah, it's not for your desktoppy-types.

of course it is, its main purpose was video, audio is just first phase

PulseAudio is as was said in the article, the consumer based focus with PipeWire becoming more workstation orientated. Hopefully it was only Manjaro that forced this on the linux world.

hopefully it was only manjaro who fucked up update, and rest of the world will switch without issues

[pal666]

feels nice to have newer better tech that replaces the old one so efficiently unlike *cough* wayland

i was already replying to something similar in other article. wayland replaces protocol, you have to rewrite all apps. pipewire replaces only implementation, it keeps pa and jack protocols intact, so you don't have to rewrite apps(modulo bugs)

[pal666]

A level of software I don't need was forced on me

fill free to select distro which better suits your needs(or make your own)

[Guest]

Also, while PipeWire can manage the same latency as JACK we are not yet as reliable. So there is some more work to do.

From the related article.

As a general user of the audio aspect of desktop linux (simple music and video usage and occassional low end game), I don't understand what this is attempting to do for me, after PulseAudio replaced something that already worked. I DO know that a recent Manjaro update completetly fucked my audio, yet thankfully a simple PulseAudio reinstall fixed that.

Replaced what that was already working? ALSA is a kernel interface, only one application can use it at a time. So as soon as one app takes exclusive control of a device through ALSA, no other app is able to play sound through it...........

Pulseaudio is great and amazing. Implementation may have had problems, but the concept was needed.

[MadByte]

I installed it on Manjaro & I'm pretty happy with it. It solved a long standing problem with pulseaudio on my system where I always had to ramp up the volume slider before audio actually played.

[timofonic]

Why do people use Manjaro? It's quite broken...