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I'm also using and happy with Pipewire but I can't remember the last time I had a PulseAudio issue, across many systems. My recollections of Linux audio issues

I'm also using and happy with Pipewire but I can't remember the last time I had a PulseAudio issue, across many systems. My recollections of Linux audio issues are more from the days when one thing might want to use OSS and another ALSA and you might have to fiddle around and enable software mixing in some ALSA configuration files to get non-exclusive sound to work. And then some issues right around when Pulse first started to be a thing. But really it's been a "Just Works" for me for years and years.

deathanatos 4y ago
Yeah, same; I can't help but think there is a vocal minority in these threads that thinks Pulse is broken. I use Pulse for some pretty complicated stuff, too; I'll pipe individual streams to my speakers, if I want to show something to my SO (e.g., a reddit video) but want to keep, like, my music or my backgrounded game on the headset. I can do that with PA, and honestly pretty easily. AFAIK, no other system supports that, though admittedly I haven't used Windows in some time. Far more complicated, I also have TTS bot I use in Discord sometimes, when I can't speak. PA allows me to push that into Discord; this is another thing I don't even begin to know how to set up on other systems. (The bot emits sound, so it's like a program playing sound, not a recording device. Discord thus doesn't recognize it as such. So I end up creating a fake input device, of sorts, and wiring the bot's output to that fake output (so it goes to Discord) but also to my own headset, so I can also hear the bot, as the TTS is far from perfect and will sometimes just make hilarious garbage of words.) I also use Bluetooth, and that usually works. It certainly works more reliably with PA on Linux than it does w/ macOS, though it is my no means flawless. But that seems to be how bluetooth is: it sucks on every OS. There will be days it won't connect to Linux, and there will be days it won't connect to macOS. I will say that Pipewire looks like it more solidly hits the nail: the thing I don't like is that PA doesn't really model audio as a graph of nodes. (PA's model is equivalent to a graph of nodes, but that it isn't just a graph of nodes makes it a lot harder to deal with and intuit.) For that reason I'm excited about Pipewire; I need to try it one of these days. PA would also be served by a better API; it is difficult to script against. Also, systemd units are hands-down a more solidly engineered thing than the mess of shell scripts they replaced. I will take systemd+journald any. day. of. the. week. People that … want shell back — I honestly can't comprehend this. I've literally not had to deal for years now with a service wedging itself in because some daemon orphaned itself somehow between some unreliable mess of shell, pidfiles, and other hacks. Is systemd/journald perfect? No, I've spent time fighting it too. But it's a lot more productive than what came before, and the design is engineered to solve the problem at hand… which the shell mess was not.
- atoav 4y ago
  Ever used a soundcard with more than two inputs and more than two outputs? Or better: that soundcard while also outputing audio via HDMI? PA is ok if you use consumer software for consumer tasks. As soon as you go into the production side of things (or even do it live and/or for money) things can fall appart pretty quickly. The vocal PA critics I know don't even complain about the way pulseaudio does things. They complain about the persistent problems this widely deployed piece of software still has after years in the field. And some of those problems are of conceptual nature. I don't Pöttering really deserves the heat he gets (no dev would), but I sometimes wish that type of (usually male) programmer would just sometimes stay with the trouble and not ride of into the sunshine when things aren't a beautiful fresh sheet of white paper anymore, but a tangled mess.
  - blooalien 4y ago
    While I'm no fan of Pöttering, I can certainly understand wanting to maybe "ride off into the sunshine" when the vast majority of humanity these days is more willing to tear down their fellow humans than they are to suggest or help with any sort of actual solution to any given problem. Makes even trying feel more than a little pointless.
  - deathanatos 4y ago
    Yes to both. My laptop has HDMI & TRS out. AFAIK, the soundcard is not capable of emitting to both HDMI & the TRS port simultaneously, but it's also not something I've ever wanted to do, so I'll admit that the limit of my use case there. (I'll use a bluetooth headphone, if I want audio while pushing something to HDMI. Though I could see using TRS headphones being a nice to have, and I honestly don't know how to configure that, or if it is even possible, since it's all represented as one card in PA.)
- blooalien 4y ago
  For me Pulse was brutally broken for the longest time. Bit by bit most of the various glitches did get worked out, but the "pain points" of that process did leave me a bit bitter over how Pulse was really kinda "forced" on us long before it was "ready for prime time". Same with systemd, and same with the KDE3⇒KDE4 transition. All pushed too hard for widespread adoption too early in their development, while many of the worst bugs were still commonplace occurrences in daily usage.

deathanatos 4y ago

Yeah, same; I can't help but think there is a vocal minority in these threads that thinks Pulse is broken. I use Pulse for some pretty complicated stuff, too; I'll pipe individual streams to my speakers, if I want to show something to my SO (e.g., a reddit video) but want to keep, like, my music or my backgrounded game on the headset. I can do that with PA, and honestly pretty easily. AFAIK, no other system supports that, though admittedly I haven't used Windows in some time. Far more complicated, I also have TTS bot I use in Discord sometimes, when I can't speak. PA allows me to push that into Discord; this is another thing I don't even begin to know how to set up on other systems. (The bot emits sound, so it's like a program playing sound, not a recording device. Discord thus doesn't recognize it as such. So I end up creating a fake input device, of sorts, and wiring the bot's output to that fake output (so it goes to Discord) but also to my own headset, so I can also hear the bot, as the TTS is far from perfect and will sometimes just make hilarious garbage of words.) I also use Bluetooth, and that usually works. It certainly works more reliably with PA on Linux than it does w/ macOS, though it is my no means flawless. But that seems to be how bluetooth is: it sucks on every OS. There will be days it won't connect to Linux, and there will be days it won't connect to macOS. I will say that Pipewire looks like it more solidly hits the nail: the thing I don't like is that PA doesn't really model audio as a graph of nodes. (PA's model is equivalent to a graph of nodes, but that it isn't just a graph of nodes makes it a lot harder to deal with and intuit.) For that reason I'm excited about Pipewire; I need to try it one of these days. PA would also be served by a better API; it is difficult to script against. Also, systemd units are hands-down a more solidly engineered thing than the mess of shell scripts they replaced. I will take systemd+journald any. day. of. the. week. People that … want shell back — I honestly can't comprehend this. I've literally not had to deal for years now with a service wedging itself in because some daemon orphaned itself somehow between some unreliable mess of shell, pidfiles, and other hacks. Is systemd/journald perfect? No, I've spent time fighting it too. But it's a lot more productive than what came before, and the design is engineered to solve the problem at hand… which the shell mess was not.

atoav 4y ago
Ever used a soundcard with more than two inputs and more than two outputs? Or better: that soundcard while also outputing audio via HDMI? PA is ok if you use consumer software for consumer tasks. As soon as you go into the production side of things (or even do it live and/or for money) things can fall appart pretty quickly. The vocal PA critics I know don't even complain about the way pulseaudio does things. They complain about the persistent problems this widely deployed piece of software still has after years in the field. And some of those problems are of conceptual nature. I don't Pöttering really deserves the heat he gets (no dev would), but I sometimes wish that type of (usually male) programmer would just sometimes stay with the trouble and not ride of into the sunshine when things aren't a beautiful fresh sheet of white paper anymore, but a tangled mess.
- blooalien 4y ago
  While I'm no fan of Pöttering, I can certainly understand wanting to maybe "ride off into the sunshine" when the vast majority of humanity these days is more willing to tear down their fellow humans than they are to suggest or help with any sort of actual solution to any given problem. Makes even trying feel more than a little pointless.
- deathanatos 4y ago
  Yes to both. My laptop has HDMI & TRS out. AFAIK, the soundcard is not capable of emitting to both HDMI & the TRS port simultaneously, but it's also not something I've ever wanted to do, so I'll admit that the limit of my use case there. (I'll use a bluetooth headphone, if I want audio while pushing something to HDMI. Though I could see using TRS headphones being a nice to have, and I honestly don't know how to configure that, or if it is even possible, since it's all represented as one card in PA.)
blooalien 4y ago
For me Pulse was brutally broken for the longest time. Bit by bit most of the various glitches did get worked out, but the "pain points" of that process did leave me a bit bitter over how Pulse was really kinda "forced" on us long before it was "ready for prime time". Same with systemd, and same with the KDE3⇒KDE4 transition. All pushed too hard for widespread adoption too early in their development, while many of the worst bugs were still commonplace occurrences in daily usage.