this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] [email protected] 97 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (17 children)

PipeWire is great.

I remember a lot of people kicking up a fuss about it years ago saying it's a mess and we should stick to PulseAudio or routing audio to ALSA, but personally for me it's been great, far less troublesome than previous solutions, and the vast majority seem to agree.

The pain points were short-lived and now we're reaping the benefits of having a modernised, easier to maintain, less janky system. Credit to the devs, and to the distros who pushed it.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 8 months ago (12 children)

There was a similar fuss when distros moved from alsa to pulse.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 8 months ago (9 children)

And rightly so. There's a reason we're migrating away from pulse to pipewire.

For the longest time the solution to any audio issues was "just uninstall PulseAudio, and use plain ALSA", and that usually worked. I held out for years and ran an ALSA only setup because it just worked and PulseAudio was always giving me one issue or another (audio lag, crackling, unexplained muting), until some applications started to drop ALSA support.

Then Pipewire came along, and so far it has been rock solid for me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

until some applications started to drop ALSA support.

Just run them with apulse

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Yeah I did that for a while with firefox.

And then firefox broke apulse again due some sandboxing permissions, and you had to override it with some about:config flag: security.sandbox.content.write_path_whitelist

So that worked for a while and then the audio in some proton games stopped working, and that's when I said fuck it and gave up. I'm only prepared to play the whack-a-mole game for so long, and if the solution to pulseaudio flakiness becomes even more alsa related flakiness, it's not worth it anymore.

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