pipewire?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 23 Apr 2022 19:36:47 -0700, ToddAndMargo wrote:
>Fedora 35
>Xfce 4.16
>Fedora-Xfce-Live-x86_64-35-1.2.iso
>
>Is Xfce using Pulse Audio or Pipe Wire?

Hi,

it depends on your distro, not on the used desktop environment what
sound server is used by default.

"XFCE4 supports freedesktop system sounds, but it is not configured out
of the box." - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/xfce#Sound

However, you probably aren't interested in system sound. I suspect you
want to know what your distro does use to provide audio for Internet
browsers, video players etc..

On Linux the backend is always ALSA, nobody does use OSS anymore. I for
example use either plain ALSA or jackd and never ever touched
pulseaudio or pipewire. I might use pipewire one day, if it's not
experimental anymore, but at the moment it is just experimental.

I'm not surprised to read that Fedora 35 seemingly defaults to
pipewire. In the past Linux distros migrated to pluseaudio when it was
unfinished and breaking working stuff, they migrated to nouveau and
dropped the nv driver, while nv was still needed, since that time
nouveau did not work for almost all NVIDIA based computers.

In a nutshell, after googling my impression is that Fedora 35 defaults
to pipewire. I don't know if Fedora has got a manual, however, Arch
Linux has got a Wiki, that more or less helps even when using other
distros, see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire .

https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1460666075033575425

Regards,
Ralf

PS: Some apps force to install dependencies that are not necessarily
needed, IOW those dependencies should be optional. I workaround this by
installing empty dummy packages. I dislike broken software such as
pulseaudio that e.g. doesn't work for pro-audio productions and isn't
needed for my daily deskto audio needs or gvfs that e.g. damages green
hard disk drives by waking them up right after they parked the heads,
hence the heads spin down and up again and again, but gvfs doesn't
provide anything I do need, it's absolutely useless. Remove gvfs
and the drives work as expected, they spin down when being ideal and
only spin up again, if the user does access the drive.

I've not used pipewire yet. It's said that it doesn't work for my
pro-audio needs and for my daily desktop audio plain ALSA works well,
then there's no need for a sound server at all. Fortunately no software
does force to install pipewire.

[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ lsb_release -id
Distributor ID:	Arch
Description:	Arch Linux
[rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ pacman -Qi pulseaudio pulseaudio-bluetooth gvfs | grep Description
Description     : Dummy package
Description     : Dummy package
Description     : Dummy package