Fedora 35 Looking To Employ WirePlumber For Managing PipeWire

[guildem]

If we can build something on top of it, without need of the main gnome components, this can be great for everyone then.

I didn't have any animosity against Gnome BTW, this is not a DE/WM I like to use, but it's a great one.

[tomas]

Hi-Angel

Since the maintainer of Pipewire media-session is the same as the one for WirePlumber, Wim Taymans, who also happens to be the creator of Pipewire, I would say the chances are rather good that that any fixes will be carried over to WirePlumber. 😊.
Also, if you follow the link to the Wiki-page you can see the following:

WirePlumber brings to following improvements

Drop-in replacement session manager for PipeWire, implements the exact same features as the example session manager

And this

WirePlumber has been kept up to data with the features in the example session manager and would need testing.

And finally this

Upgrade/compatibility impact

Should not cause any change.

Of course, there can always be bugs like in all software.

[Hi-Angel]

Hi-Angel

Since the maintainer of Pipewire media-session is the same as the one for WirePlumber, Wim Taymans, who also happens to be the creator of Pipewire, I would say the chances are rather good that that any fixes will be carried over to WirePlumber. 😊.
Also, if you follow the link to the Wiki-page you can see the following:



And this



And finally this



Of course, there can always be bugs like in all software.

I hope you are right. What worries me is that the text you are quoting was actually written before various problems with pipewire-media-session turned up, and then subsequently were fixed. But yeah, let's hope the fixes were (or will be by the F35 release) ported to WirePlumber.

[bisby]

I hope they patch it before using Wireplumber... I have tried it twice and I uninstalled it within an hour each time... It's still buggy as heck.

I'm in the same boat. Tried it twice. First time I didn't really know what I was doing so I changed back. Second time I did know what I was doing, but wireplumber wasn't playing nice with things. Was forcing zoom calls to freeze up, etc. Once I swapped back to pipewire-media-session, things were fixed. So it might be great going forward, but for me currently the out of the box experience wasn't great. I don't know if I missed a setup step somehow, but it wasn't a drop in replacement for me.

edit: I tried this quite recently, but I don't know what version of wireplumber I tried. Maybe the recent 0.3 release fixed all the things I was having issues with.

[tomas]

bisby

And did you report any of your problems to the WirePlumber developers (the same developers as for Pipewire-media-session)?

[bisby]

bisby

And did you report any of your problems to the WirePlumber developers (the same developers as for Pipewire-media-session)?

no, but I'm also not declaring this as a widespread issue or a reason why fedora shouldn't switch. I was simply sharing my experience. I don't have time to go through and do the necessary troubleshooting steps that I feel would be necessary to submit a proper bug report. All the details I have I've basically put here, and they aren't that helpful (at least if I was the developers, seeing a "it doesnt work" report with no logs or anything would make me groan). I checked my pacman cache, it was version 0.4.1 I was having issues with, thats about the only new info I have.

My point was simply that this is very early software still (it's a 0.x release after all) and people should either be willing to submit those bug reports should they arise... or wait. I've opted to wait.

[pal666]

Maybe not for me then...

you don't have to customize it

[evil_core]

I'm in the same boat. Tried it twice. First time I didn't really know what I was doing so I changed back. Second time I did know what I was doing, but wireplumber wasn't playing nice with things. Was forcing zoom calls to freeze up, etc. Once I swapped back to pipewire-media-session, things were fixed. So it might be great going forward, but for me currently the out of the box experience wasn't great. I don't know if I missed a setup step somehow, but it wasn't a drop in replacement for me.

edit: I tried this quite recently, but I don't know what version of wireplumber I tried. Maybe the recent 0.3 release fixed all the things I was having issues with.

How to 'use it"? (systemctl --user enable pipewire)? I've installed it in ArchLinux, but it's not starting with KDE Plasma...

[Hi-Angel]

How to 'use it"? (systemctl --user enable pipewire)? I've installed it in ArchLinux, but it's not starting with KDE Plasma...

I assume you are asking about pipewire in general, not wireplumber, right? You can follow the Arch Wiki article on PipeWire, but basically once you installed it, just execute

systemctl --user enable pipewire{,.socket,-pulse,-media-session} pipewire-pulse.socket
systemctl --user start  pipewire{,.socket,-pulse,-media-session} pipewire-pulse.socket

These commands are copied from my command line history (except oddly enough I just realized that I never `enable`ed it till now, only `start`ed, and yet it starts on system boot automatically).

Archlinux and KDE (with i3) too here, so I confirm it should work fine for you.

If you ever want to try WirePlumber specifically, just replace `pipewire-media-session` in commands with `wireplumber`

[evil_core]

I assume you are asking about pipewire in general, not wireplumber, right? You can follow the Arch Wiki article on PipeWire, but basically once you installed it, just execute

systemctl --user enable pipewire{,.socket,-pulse,-media-session} pipewire-pulse.socket
systemctl --user start pipewire{,.socket,-pulse,-media-session} pipewire-pulse.socket

These commands are copied from my command line history (except oddly enough I just realized that I never `enable`ed it till now, only `start`ed, and yet it starts on system boot automatically).

Archlinux and KDE (with i3) too here, so I confirm it should work fine for you.

If you ever want to try WirePlumber specifically, just replace `pipewire-media-session` in commands with `wireplumber`

Instead of additional systemctl invocation to start, you can use 'enable --now' syntax.

I'm using Archlinux/Plasma too, so we should have similar experience:

But something is weird, because I've never messed with wireplumber service:

loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/wireplumber.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)

Because it's enabled by default(vendor preset), it should be enabled by defaultm without messing with systemctl command'

So as I understand wire