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Pipewire: works.
Pulseaudio: worksn't.
Really, it's as simple as that. Pulseaudio tried to be the systemd of sound and ~~failed~~ succeeded pretty horribly. Even its packaging was horrible, back when it was first put into Fedora and I tried uninstalling, it threatened taking down Libreoffice and Gedit with it.
IIRC wasn't Pulseaudio and systemd made by the same person?
No idea if that's the case but they certainly seem to have been made with the same mentality. FOSS has for a while suffered of what I call the "Icaza pest", trying to bring the Microsoft way of design and programming into Linux. The results and troubles this causes abound, considering eg.: the fart that has been Gnome themes since 3.x, or the Gnome posturing back in the day that "users have no right to change their settings" when modernization of Gnome-terminal, and how it'd interact with stuff like screen and dtach, were discused.
It's not all FOSS it's just those projects. You don't have to use Gnome.
But their choices do impact other projects. I may not use Gnome, but the choices made on theming (or lack of) , for example, now also effect XFCE.
pipewire simply eliminated all the quirks from my use case.
the transition was annoying, but i don't even think about how bad linux audio used to be anymore.
wish the transition to wayland was going this well.
The transition for me was "install Pipewire and its pulseaudio compatibility package, remove pulseaudio, reboot."
There are a couple of quirks (updating Apparmor rules makes KDE think I've reattached all my audio devices), but it's mostly pretty smooth.
I waited for canonical to enable it by default. The annoying part for me was undoing the workarounds PulseAudio needed to do what I wanted.
Pipewire was honestly the most pain-free introduction of a new audio technology on Linux; it was a nice change of pace.
Yeah. PulseAudio is made by the same wunderkind who brought us fucking systemd.
As someone who occasionally dabbles in music production on Linux, I love that Pipewire lets me run JACK and Pulseaudio apps side-by-side without having to jump through hoops.
I always had trouble with the sound on video calls with PulseAudio. Since I've switched to Pipewire, everything has been smooth.
Would love to use it, it has the incorrect channel map for my surround sound system which apparently cannot be changed like it can in pulse? After that gets sorted then sure.
my system sets the wrong bitrate for a device but I was able to configure it, you may want to browse the wireplumber wiki and see if its config options can meet your use case
That's a good tip, it probably can but I'll need a bit of learning to figure it out. The Linux audio situation is a hell of a learning curve sometimes.
I miss the pulseaudio restart command.
Sometimes my 3.5mm aux isn't detected in pipewire until I reboot.
pulseaudio -r used to do the trick iirc
On my distro (debian) I can use systemctl --user restart pipewire.service.
Thank you, I added the command to my Linux Journal,
Your post motivated me to do some more trials and it ended up that my greetd greeter was locking up the audio sink.
So I made sure to add a command after the greeter exits killall -u greeter and the sink finally passed correctly to the logged in user just fine after that.
In reviewing the arch wiki some more too I've installed wire plumber session manager for pipewire, I am still a little confused about it's function and relation to pipewire but maybe that has helped too?
Cheers :)
This is just generally how you should restart most things on systemd systems.
I've been using Pipewire for a while, it was great because I could use my Bluetooth headset with a better audio Codec than in Pulseaudio. Unfortunately, my headset stopped working one day suddenly with Pipewire. (maybe after a dist-upgrade?) No amount of disconnecting, unbonding etc. would work. Went back to Pulseaudio as a sound server. Sad.
Neither Pulseaudio nor Pipewire remember to use by screen speakers (hdmi) as default, though. It always switches back to the internal sound card.