Debian 12 Switches To PipeWire & WirePlumber By Default With The GNOME Desktop

In addition to Ubuntu 22.10 switching to PipeWire as the default audio server replacement to PulseAudio, upstream Debian has done the same ahead of their Debian GNU/Linux 12 release next year.

Jeremy Bicha of Canonical ushered through the change for switching Debian's upstream default when using the GNOME desktop to PipeWire along with the WirePlumber manager.

Since mid-September has been this Debian bug report over changing to PipeWire by default for gnome-core with Debian Sid and the Debian 12 "Bookworm" release. At the moment this only affects GNOME users on Debian moving forward.

Debian and Ubuntu join the likes of Fedora Workstation, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Pop!_OS, and many other Linux distributions already using PipeWire and WirePlubmer by default on the desktop as a modern and robust alternative to the likes of PulseAudio and JACK.

Separately, yesterday also marked the release of PipeWire 0.3.59 with Bluetooth LE support, improvements to the ALSA plug-in, Pulse server tweaks, and a variety of fixes throughout.

Debian 12 as the next major Debian GNU/Linux release will likely debut around mid-2023.