4 ms·

PipeWire is like 10 years newer than PulseAudio. It probably had a chance to learn some lessons! IIRC before PulseAudio we had to mess around with ALSA directl

PipeWire is like 10 years newer than PulseAudio. It probably had a chance to learn some lessons! IIRC before PulseAudio we had to mess around with ALSA directly (memory hazy, it was a while ago). It could be a bit of a pain.

fao_ 9mo ago
I remember ALSA. Sure, it was finnicky to use `alsamixer` to unmute the master channels now and then, but I personally never had any trouble with it.
- sam_lowry_ 9mo ago
  Alsa with dmix is my current setup on ArchLinux.
- account42 9mo ago
  I still need to use alsamixer to unmute my headphones after accidentally unplugging them and plugging them in again fails to do so. That's with PipeWire - never had that problem with just ALSA.
  - fao_ 9mo ago
    Eh, I had to do that with pulseaudio too, but constantly, across all distros and headphones. Pipewire is shonky, I have to restart now and then on my steam deck (I'm using it as a desktop), but it's still much better than pulseaudio. Even ALSA was better than pulseaudio lol
    - ahartmetz 9mo ago
      For most of the (sadly not shorter) life of PulseAudio, ALSA was more reliable, but at some point, Firefox got a new audio backend that straight up dropped support for ALSA, and a few games started crashing with backtraces indicating audio trouble when not run with PulseAudio. I've had to deal with PulseAudio's dropouts under load, latencies and lockups for 2-3 years before PipeWire became a viable replacement.
ahartmetz 9mo ago
PipeWire was also made by a guy with a lot of multimedia experience (GStreamer). ALSA was kind of OK after mixing was enabled by default and if you didn't need to switch outputs of a running application between anything but internal speakers and headphones (which worked basically in hardware). With any additional devices that you could add and remove, ALSA became a more serious limitation, depending. You could usually choose your audio devices (including microphones) at least at the beginning of a video conference / playing a movie etc, but it was janky (unreliable, list of 20 devices for one multi-channel sound card) and needed explicit support from all applications. Not sure if it ever worked with Bluetooth.
- Sophira 9mo ago
  > Not sure if it ever worked with Bluetooth. It does, with the help of BlueALSA[0]. [0] https://github.com/arkq/bluez-alsa https://github.com/arkq/bluez-alsa
jjmarr 9mo ago
I installed Gentoo in 2014 and getting PulseAudio working was much easier than ALSA. It was also much better. I get ALSA followed the Unix philosophy of doing one thing but I want my audio mixer to play multiple sounds at once.
- account42 9mo ago
  Gentoo in 2014 had dmix enabled by default without the need for any user configuration. I know because I was using it.
  - jjmarr 9mo ago
    I got stuck for two weeks installing the kernel because I forgot to mount /boot. Perhaps I disabled it by accident when goofing around in alsamixer? Or my card did or didn't have hardware mixing? I didn't actually know anything about Linux at the time and started with Gentoo because I saw a meme saying "install Gentoo" and people told me not to start with that distro. So it's possible I messed up the default config by accident. Either way PulseAudio worked after I emerged it.

fao_ 9mo ago

I remember ALSA. Sure, it was finnicky to use `alsamixer` to unmute the master channels now and then, but I personally never had any trouble with it.

sam_lowry_ 9mo ago
Alsa with dmix is my current setup on ArchLinux.
account42 9mo ago
I still need to use alsamixer to unmute my headphones after accidentally unplugging them and plugging them in again fails to do so. That's with PipeWire - never had that problem with just ALSA.
- fao_ 9mo ago
  Eh, I had to do that with pulseaudio too, but constantly, across all distros and headphones. Pipewire is shonky, I have to restart now and then on my steam deck (I'm using it as a desktop), but it's still much better than pulseaudio. Even ALSA was better than pulseaudio lol
  - ahartmetz 9mo ago
    For most of the (sadly not shorter) life of PulseAudio, ALSA was more reliable, but at some point, Firefox got a new audio backend that straight up dropped support for ALSA, and a few games started crashing with backtraces indicating audio trouble when not run with PulseAudio. I've had to deal with PulseAudio's dropouts under load, latencies and lockups for 2-3 years before PipeWire became a viable replacement.

ahartmetz 9mo ago

PipeWire was also made by a guy with a lot of multimedia experience (GStreamer). ALSA was kind of OK after mixing was enabled by default and if you didn't need to switch outputs of a running application between anything but internal speakers and headphones (which worked basically in hardware). With any additional devices that you could add and remove, ALSA became a more serious limitation, depending. You could usually choose your audio devices (including microphones) at least at the beginning of a video conference / playing a movie etc, but it was janky (unreliable, list of 20 devices for one multi-channel sound card) and needed explicit support from all applications. Not sure if it ever worked with Bluetooth.

Sophira 9mo ago
> Not sure if it ever worked with Bluetooth. It does, with the help of BlueALSA[0]. [0] https://github.com/arkq/bluez-alsa https://github.com/arkq/bluez-alsa

jjmarr 9mo ago

I installed Gentoo in 2014 and getting PulseAudio working was much easier than ALSA. It was also much better. I get ALSA followed the Unix philosophy of doing one thing but I want my audio mixer to play multiple sounds at once.

account42 9mo ago
Gentoo in 2014 had dmix enabled by default without the need for any user configuration. I know because I was using it.
- jjmarr 9mo ago
  I got stuck for two weeks installing the kernel because I forgot to mount /boot. Perhaps I disabled it by accident when goofing around in alsamixer? Or my card did or didn't have hardware mixing? I didn't actually know anything about Linux at the time and started with Gentoo because I saw a meme saying "install Gentoo" and people told me not to start with that distro. So it's possible I messed up the default config by accident. Either way PulseAudio worked after I emerged it.