> The technical sophistication of PipeWire is almost purely made possible by Linux improving
I'm not sure about that. I guess improvements in ALSA have contributed. But PipeWire was created by none other than the guy who rearchitected GStreamer's foundations after GStreamer had been brittle and prone to crashing for years. I don't think that there was a better person in the Linux ecosystem to do it. It's the second system effect without featuritis, like when some of the Unix people created Plan 9.
Personally, I was not happy with PulseAudio, and I'm very happy with PipeWire. Great, great stuff.
I say that as both a user and somebody who created a prototype for a sound system for an embedded platform on top of PulseAudio that was, AFAICT, abandoned because it just couldn't deliver some things. PipeWire was on the radar at the time but too much in its infancy to use back then. That stopped being the case years ago.
I love this paean, and I am delighted to assimilate this gleeful happy memetics into my own. But I think the hate sucks & can get lost. Maybe it's not hate, but I'm just so done, so fed up with intolerance and/or nattering against Lennart Poettering, and it all comes off as ridiculous to me. Whatever the qualms: Pulseaudio and systemd have been such vast giant leaps over where we were before. Most of the voices are just against. That is, they don't saying what else we ought have done, they dont speculate constructively. They're winges (thank you Ben Collins for re-introducing me to that word). It would be such a bleaker worse world without pulseaudio and without systemd. (I'm sorry to hear your product ran into such difficulty though!)
I absolutely am happy to hand a massive trophy to Wim Taymans for building a truly elegant API architecture. But I repeat again: the core of PipeWire would not have been possible without the better Linux we have today. PipeWire competes with JACK because of https://docs.pipewire.org/page_dma_buf.html . That's basically a fact.
Pipewire is a refinement of the idea, many of these lessons are hard won by pulseaudio itself, being used for years.
Linux audio before pulseaudio was just a lot worse, for many people pulseaudio meant not having to think about how audio worked any more.
Pulseaudio saved my bacon just the other day with virtualization - since the server runs on OSX I could pipe all the audio devices from an OSX host to a Linux guest.
I’ve had nothing but issues with PulseAudio, leading me to disable it and use plain ALSA (with dmix) on basically every Linux system I’ve used. I’m excited that it’s being replaced, but I no longer use desktop Linux very often.
I'm not sure about that. I guess improvements in ALSA have contributed. But PipeWire was created by none other than the guy who rearchitected GStreamer's foundations after GStreamer had been brittle and prone to crashing for years. I don't think that there was a better person in the Linux ecosystem to do it. It's the second system effect without featuritis, like when some of the Unix people created Plan 9.
Personally, I was not happy with PulseAudio, and I'm very happy with PipeWire. Great, great stuff.
I say that as both a user and somebody who created a prototype for a sound system for an embedded platform on top of PulseAudio that was, AFAICT, abandoned because it just couldn't deliver some things. PipeWire was on the radar at the time but too much in its infancy to use back then. That stopped being the case years ago.