PipeWire was announced last year as a new Red Hat projects with aspirations to be to video as PulseAudio is to audio on the Linux desktop. Other PipeWire goals include professional audio support equal to or better than JACK, full Wayland/Flatpak support, and more. Red Hat is making a lot of progress on PipeWire, but it's not yet ready to be the default on the Linux desktop.

Red Hat's Christian Schaller has shared a status update on PipeWire after discussing the latest state with PipeWire creator Wim Taymans.

PipeWire is quickly working to fill its primary mission of video handling, PipeWire is beginning to work with GNOME's Cheese program, they are moving along with their goal of addressing JACK / professional audio needs, ALSA emulation remains in place, and good Bluetooth support also remains a focus.

Schaller summarized the PipeWire state as:

So you might read this and think, hey if all this work we are almost done right? Well unfortunately no, the components mentioned here are good enough for us to verify the design and features, but they still need a lot of maturing and testing before they will be in a state where we can consider switching Fedora Workstation over to using them by default. So there are many warts that needs to be cleaned up still, but a lot of things have become a lot more tangible now than when we last spoke about PipeWire in September. The video handling we hope to enable in Fedora Workstation 28 as mentioned, while the other pieces we will work towards enabling in later releases as the components mature.

The current state of PipeWire is covered in full via Christian's blog.