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I remember there was oss and alsa. Then on top of that you had esd or artsd, with incompatible APIs and userland delays. Then at some point they were replaced w
by thriftwy 2y ago
I remember there was oss and alsa.
Then on top of that you had esd or artsd, with incompatible APIs and userland delays.
Then at some point they were replaced with pulseaudio. I've just noticed now that pulseaudio is also replaced with pipewire in latest Ubuntu.
That does not instill confidence in that they have any idea what they are doing.
I remember that as far as on 2012 some Linux game ports from Steam (before Proton was a thing) failed to play sound.
Other than that, it took them a decade to figure out that sound should switch to HDMI when it is plugged in. It may still require arcane config changes and may break down.
I've opened the post to read about pipewire, and it seems that clicking an anchor does nothing. So it's not only sound they can't get right.
- shmerl 2y agoDon't worry, Pipewire is a very good development.
- Cloudef 2y agoPipewire unifies all the apis, and is fully backward compatible. It has own API too, but you don't have to use it. You can write app using any of the apis, alsa, pulse, jack, and pipewire can work with it. You only need pipewire api if you need more control or pipe through video as well. JACK is very flexible approach to audio (think of unix pipes but audio) and this is what pipewire is inspired by, but targets the general desktop use and not just audio production as JACK does. Generally pipewire stays out of the way and works as pulseaudio replacement, but with the pipelines you can do a lot as a power user. Personally I think pipewire is one of the best things that has happened to linux, and since it shims all the previous audio apis instead of trying to tape the existing solutions into the package, it actually removes bloat from your system and you don't have to write weird libasound config files anymore.