Replacing pulseaudio with pipewire

[Flemur]

You can replace pulseaudio with pipewire!

https://pipewire.org/

In Mint 20.1, I installed pipewire (from normal repos) and removed pulseaudio, and could play audio thru firefox and wine applications. However I couldn't record "what you hear" ("Monitor of..."), as I could on Arch, below.

For installing the extra PA components in Mint see "How to get Pipewire working on 20.04"
https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comment ... g_on_2004/
but I couldn't install the .deb files (the reddit thred suggests compiling everything).

On Arch, I installed pipewire + pipewire-pulse + pipewire-alsa, and pacman (Arch package installer, like "apt") removed pulseaudio, and the "pulse" input and output remained unchanged and pavucontrol still worked for selecting "Monitor of ... Sterero" and it stayed selected between boots. Runs thru /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse I guess, there are no pulseaudio processes running.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PipeWire

[Portreve]

I recently listened to a GNU+Linux related podcast where they discussed this very thing (in the context of it coming with the upcoming v34 release of Fedora) and it sounds interesting. They brought up Audio Hijack (a macOS program for recording and/or re-routing audio) and says this would be capable of handling those sort of tasks as well.

Right now, it's very early on in its development, so everyone needs to be patient and let it develop and mature.

Perhaps in a couple years pipewire, in conjunction with Wayland, will truly be the future of our choice of OS platform.

[MrEen]

Right now, it's very early on in its development, so everyone needs to be patient and let it develop and mature.

Wim Taymans started work on it back in 2015 (or possibly sooner) but I believe it was a one man show for quite some time.

I think the main issue is going to be how Ubuntu implements it. I read a bug report last year(!) where a dev said "Will be fixed by PipeWire", so it seems Ubuntu gave up on PulseAudio a year and change before even trying to implement PipeWire and figure it's going to be the next great thing. With all the choices they made at the introduction of the new sof audio driver, I don't hold out much hope they're going to get this one correct for some time.

And a quote from the PipeWire team:

Alongside Wayland and Flatpak we expect PipeWire to provide a core building block for the future of Linux application development.

Ohh, that sounds wonderful to me! Except I'm not using Wayland nor Flatpaks.

I really hope this does lessen the audio issues on Linux, but I'm not placing any bets on it. I think your timeline is a good one to hope for the project to be matured to where it needs to be, but could be a little on the light side.

[Portreve]

Wim Taymans started work on it back in 2015 (or possibly sooner) but I believe it was a one man show for quite some time.

... et seq ...

Ok, so that's all new information to me. The podcast in question didn't mention any of the points you just brought up. They did mention that Nvidia is working on a Wayland-compatible driver, so I guess that's a good thing.

Back in the day, I remember as new developments would come up that Apple would tout, usually things they pioneered, but not always. I guess it's been a while since I have been in that mode, mentally, and it's a good feeling.

I just hope Wayland and PipeWire don't turn into the next system-d, but I guess time will tell.