Ubuntu 22.10 Switching To PipeWire For Linux Audio Handling

[jacob]

I tried Fedora 36 with GNOME 42 recently, I'm a little confused with the experience. Quite a bit was Fedora specific, but I do recall the following:

You can't minimize apps? At least when I was testing some software out like Unigine Heaven I could not hide the launcher window. I'm a bit confused why that's the case and what you're meant to do (shift it to a different workspace?). There wasn't anything in the windows titlebar with right-click context, nor in the top panel interaction for the app regarding minimizing. I believe more native apps like Nautilus supported such via those menus at least, but it seems it's not consistently supported?

VRR also didn't work on Wayland, even with fullscreen app which worked on X11. I believe this is coming eventually.

GNOME also doesn't seem to offer an ability to disable compositing. That's rarely relevant, but with graphical workloads it does help. On Plasma steam games can disable compositing and it runs a lot better, including with windowed games or benchmarks. Pragmatically at least it seems to work for fullscreen usage implicitly where it'd be most useful, so that's good at least

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I haven't used Gnome long enough to really form much of opinion about it. The only real gripe I have that'd affect me is window management with lack of being able to minimize windows, but maybe that's me using it wrong and I'm meant to know some shortcut to throw it to another workspace and switch between those quickly (overview is neat but that sort of switching would be annoying).

You can minimise windows but you must enable the maximise/minimise buttons (it's in the appearance settings or in GNOME Tweak, I don't remember). Yes it's silly but you do it once and then it's problem solved.

[Etherman]

It's always kinda funny when the [other DE] trolls invade any thread with gnome hate and the same stereotypes again and again and again. It's so foreseeable.

Meanwhile: happily using Gnome 42. Even being a professional user, doing development taks, server and infrastructure maintenance taks, lots of communication, some video creation for yt,...

And to make it even more outrageous: I think wayland has long surpassed X11 in terms of useful features and everyday performance. No kidding.

It's a real PITA not being able to drag and drop individual files from .zip archives to Nautilus with Wayland. I won't use it for work.

[archerallstars]

GNOME is really nice to the eyes for me. IMO, it's the most beautiful desktop UI out there. And GNOME Circle apps are very good.

However, it has 2 major issues:

1. It's impossible to adjust mouse wheel scrolling speed in Wayland. However, the team is already in the process of implementing this feature.
2. The file chooser doesn't have a thumbnail mode, thus the worst file chooser out there because it's extremely hard for the users to choose the right file, especially when choosing a picture. This issue has been reported 18 years ago.

The 2 issues above are not present in KDE... But I won't be using KDE anytime soon because I just don't like every aspect of the UI. It's not like they're too complicated to use, but the design just look ancient in my eyes. I am fine with a lot of options. In fact, I like options (when they're presenting themselves properly). I can't find something like GNOME Circle in KDE land. Only a few apps has beautiful UI.

I came from Windows 11 to Fedora 36 without any regret.

[dc740]

yesss! that's great. I tried it on Gentoo and all I can say is that I really liked it. I distro-hop once in a while on different machines, but I keep my main workstations on Ubuntu (and plan to keep it that way for years to come). so this comes as a very good news.

[skeevy420]

On Manjaro it's only an optional dependency for kio and gwenview. I wouldn't be surprised if other distributions have KDE/QT dependencies messed up. I filed a bug report at Arch Linux for spectacle. You, or someone else, should probably do the same for Ubuntu.

For a followup: Closed as "Not a bug"

This isn't anything specific to spectacle. Installing qt5-imageformats adds support for the included formats across all Qt applications, and there is nothing in spectacle that specifically requires any of those.

Since it adds four optional formats to Spectacle I think that's a bad reason to not include an optional dependency so I requested a reopen with:

Reason for request: It is required for saving WebP images in Spectacle. In Gwenview the package qt5-imageformats is an optional dependency for the same exact reason I brought up this issue. Why is it OK for Gwenview and not Spectacle to have this listed as an optional dependency? Which begs the question: If it doesn't belong in Spectacle as an optional dependency should file a bug reports to have qt5-imageformats removed as an optional dependency from other Qt/KDE programs like Gwenview and Digikam?

and of course I left out a single I

[skeevy420]

This thread has gone way off topic.

Yes it has, but this time people were helped, problems were solved, and bugs were filed. At least something productive came from it.

[polarathene]

You can minimise windows but you must enable the maximise/minimise buttons (it's in the appearance settings or in GNOME Tweak, I don't remember). Yes it's silly but you do it once and then it's problem solved.

Not available in default Gnome settings (appearance only had "style" and "background").

Open Software app => Install Gnome Tweaks => Window Title section

Cheers!

[Vermilion]

You can't minimize apps? At least when I was testing some software out like Unigine Heaven I could not hide the launcher window. I'm a bit confused why that's the case and what you're meant to do (shift it to a different workspace?). There wasn't anything in the windows titlebar with right-click context, nor in the top panel interaction for the app regarding minimizing. I believe more native apps like Nautilus supported such via those menus at least, but it seems it's not consistently supported?

Yes, the workflow in GNOME requires a bit of getting used to, and it starts making sense once you're familiar with it.

You're supposed to launch apps in their own workspaces. From the overview you can either drag-and-drop app icons into different workspaces, or if you prefer keyboard-based workflows, use Ctrl+Alt+Right/Left to switch workspaces and type app names in the overview. Window management then happens through workspaces, either from the overview, keyboard shortcuts, or touchpad gestures (Wayland only).
That's why in the default experience, there's no minimize buttons, and no panel to restore minimized apps from.

I'm personally too used to this workflow that I have a bad time when forced to use Windows occasionally, with muscle memory getting in the way.

[Almindor]

Pipewire recording works, generally speaking.
It may be helpful to purge pulseaudio and/or delete all hidden config files in the user directory.

This makes no sense to me. Why should pulseaudio or app settings influence recording when using pipewire? If those settings worked with pulse, why not pipewire. It's supposed to be compatible. Also the broken recording wasn't app specific, any recording app (skype, the gnome record app etc.) just produced what I'd guess as wrongly sampled data.

[user1]

I’ve been using PipeWire for a few weeks now on Solus with a SMSL M8A v3 DAC. Only issue I’ve run into is DSD playback. Aside from that it has been stable. Here’s a useful guide: https://discovery.endeavouros.com/au...#--sample-rate

I was actually wondering if it's even possible to have native DSD playback on Linux (without converting to PCM) because AFAIK even on Windows you need an ASIO driver for that.