Re: Switch default from PulseAudio to PipeWire (and WirePlumber) for audio

>>>>> "Dylan" == Dylan Aïssi <[email protected]> writes:

    Dylan> We cannot talk about PipeWire without mentioning its session
    Dylan> manager.  Thus, this change should go along the switch of the
    Dylan> default session manager, i.e. from the deprecated
    Dylan> pipewire-media-session to WirePlumber.  We still use
    Dylan> pipewire-media-session as default session manager because it
    Dylan> enables PipeWire *only* for screen-sharing and not for
    Dylan> managing audio.  Whereas WirePlumber always configures
    Dylan> PipeWire for audio excepted by modifying conf files in a
    Dylan> non-compatible packaging way. This issues was also hit on the
    Dylan> Arch Linux side [4]. This WirePlumber behavior may be solved
    Dylan> in the next major release 0.5 planned later this year.

I would really like to see bookworm with pipewire and wireplumber.

Major advantages:

* I find pipewire is much more likely than pulseaudio to do something
  sane when there are multiple potential sound devices and when sound
  devices are added/removed.

* Finally, I can use bluetooth on linux with reasonably good audio
  quality!

* pw-jack is good enough for some jack use cases, and is so much easier
  to deal with than jackd plus jack-sink and jack-source.

The disadvantages:

* pw-jack isn't really good enough for all my JACK use cases.  Doing
  network audio doesn't really work well, even given the various options
  on the pipewire wiki.

* I find that MIDI gets into a very unfortunate state when I crash a
  jack client sometimes and I end up having to restart pipewire and
  wireplumber to recover.
  I have not been able to articulate reproducing conditions enough to
  file a useful bug report.

* If you do need jackd for real because pipewire's jack isn't quite good
  enough, pipewire's jack client didn't work at all last time I used
  it.  So you may be forced to shut down wireplumber and pipewire and
  start up pulseaudio.

My jack/pulse needs are kind of complicated because I do need system
audio for my screen reader and realtime audio for my music.  And
unfortunately when performing live, I do need to mix the screen reader
audio into my performance headphones, which means I need to get audio
from the pulseish side into the jackish sideof things.  Which is to say
that I cannot isolate jackd from pipewire/pulseaudio.

I agree with everyone who suggests switching sooner rather than later.