What are the main differences between pipewire and pulseaudio? Which one is better? What are other alternative popular sound servers besides these two?
Pipewire is much better than Pulseaudio, especially for pro audio work because of its low latency. Another popular option is JACK, which must be used in conjunction with Pulseaudio. Harder to set up, but is also great for pro audio. Some audio engineers were having issues with Pipewire when it first came out so they went back to using JACK, but I think Pipewire has improved. Pipewire has been flawless on my end.
If you’re not in pro audio or any kind of multimedia work, it doesn’t really matter and you can just stick with whatever comes pre-configured on your distro. But my vote goes to Pipewire as the best server for pretty much anyone.
which must be used in conjunction with Pulseaudio
Why? Just why?
any kind of multimedia work, it doesn’t really matter and you can just stick with whatever comes pre-configured on your distro. But my vote goes to Pipewire as the best server for pretty much anyone.
Or gaming. PulseAudio has insane latency. Use JACK or no server(that means use ALSA). Maybe Pipewire has tolerable latency, but I didn’t test it myself.
Tl;Dr use pipewire, it’s just better and also handles screen capture on Wayland (which looks way better and has a much lower performance impact than X native screen capture in my experience)
Pipewire fixed some Bluetooth issues for me.
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ALSA
Read xkcd. To be fair it doesn’t seem to create new audio api, but be alternative implementation.
I still recommend bare ALSA for average users. This includes gamers.