PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead

Agreed. I've recently migrated to Arch and pipewire/pipewire-pulse made the audio setup a breeze.

Still facing several bugs in pipewire/wireplumber on Alpine. Not entirely sure if I missed some configuration (it's a bit confusing) or just buggy, though I've def seen some other user reports with the same bugs as me. Probably going back to pulse to get working audio/bluetooth again.

Linux is a real trip, man. Bluetooth was introduced 24 years ago and we can still barely make it work. Seems to work on Windows, Android, Mac.

because it's very easy to use and works good

Pipewire was started by Wim Taymans, one of the gstreamer people. Originally it was supposed to allow video-streams in sandboxed environments like flatpak (and was known as "pulsevideo"), but then he noticed that it could be extended to do audio as well.

Since pulseaudio's architecture isn't well-suited to incorporate sandboxing, that project continued and it turned out that it could handle compatibility with both pulseaudio (the sound server for "consumerist" needs) and jack (the one for "pro audio" people where low latency is paramount).

You can even use programs like QJackCtl, which was written for Jack, to perform audio routing and stuff with pipewire!

So now, we have a sound server that

1. is much nicer to configure than pulseaudio

2. is compatible with sandboxing

3. is compatible with pulseaudio, jack and the older alsa APIs and features

4. is developed much more quickly than either of the others

See also https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DefaultPipeWire

Pipewire has become more usable for audio during the last year.

Actual advantages of pipewire vs pulseaudio are not that obvious, but it should mostly be lower-latency, hopefully more stable, and more flexible (provide something like the old `jack` API where any stream can be plugged anywhere). Also, support for sandboxing (flatpak portals) is first-class, as one of the early design goals was to provide this for video.

Pipewire is also used in most places where wayland is, to provide screen sharing capabilities (now, if proprietary software could catch up... looking at zoom).

And lastly, pipewire should hopefully become one of the best APIs for accessing webcams and other video streaming devices in the future (allowing stuff like sharing a camera between multiple apps, simple sandboxing, middleware for compositing or video effects -- think background removal tools). Support is a bit sparse for now, but there's a LD_PRELOAD workaround for v4l2 interfaces.

Edit: also, pipewire gained support for nicer bluetooth codecs faster than pulseaudio did.