Pipewire is a true blessing for Linux
Official Release Page for those who don’t want to read the Phoronix article: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/releases/1.0.0
It’s great to see that Pipewire has reached this milestone. Personally I’ve been using it since 0.3.35 for very basic audio needs and it’s been a very smooth transition. After installation I never had to tinker with it anymore. "It just works"TM
I had to do some tinkering way back to make my bluetooth earplugs be recognized as an audio device.
Not sure if that is still needed today
For a long time, people shat all over pipewire and said it wasn’t viable as a replacement for the existing Linux audio stack, but clearly that hasn’t ended up being the case
I’ve heard nothing but good, and replacing Pulseaudio was painless. It was Pulseaudio that people hated on in my experience
Hol up, 1.0? I’ve been using it and thought it was around for few years already
In F/OSS, it is not unusual for software to stay below 1.0 version for a long time yet still get a lot of use. Just look at how long OpenSSL, for example, was at 0.9.something, while already being of crucial importance to a lot of internet infrastructure.
The reasons for this are varied, but the most important is probably simply that free software developers don’t feel the pressure to call a product 1.0 when they don’t believe it is ready to be called that.
Pipewire makes me feel like I’m a bit stupid. I keep reading about it, I read the introduction and FAQ on their website, yet I still couldn’t tell you what that thing even does. All I know is it’s a slightly less buggy drop-in replacement for pulseaudio, and pulseaudio is something I use because Firefox forces me to. (I would still be on plain old ALSA if it weren’t for Firefox.)
Also, it definitely did not “just work” for me out of the box, I had to do quite some digging and some very non-obvious stuff to get it to a) start up and b) let me use my microphone. I still don’t even know what “starting up” really means for pipewire (is there a daemon or something?), the website likes to pretend that isn’t a thing, but without doing some stuff to start it up, audio just won’t work for pulseaudio and pipewire applications…
The Arch wiki made installing it very painless for me. Zero problems. Install it, remove PA, activate systemd service.
btw
lets go
Brilliant piece of software
Oh nice! I wonder if this will fix discord streaming audio?
