• nintendiator@feddit.cl
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    8 months ago

    Pipewire: works.

    Pulseaudio: worksn’t.

    Really, it’s as simple as that. Pulseaudio tried to be the systemd of sound and failed succeeded pretty horribly. Even its packaging was horrible, back when it was first put into Fedora and I tried uninstalling, it threatened taking down Libreoffice and Gedit with it.

    • TheHarpyEagle@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      back when it was first put into Fedora and I tried uninstalling, it threatened taking down Libreoffice and Gedit with it.

      I did this back when I was a newbie and somehow destroyed either the display server or some other part of the GUI. Sound issues have made me nervous ever since.

    • Auzy@beehaw.org
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      8 months ago

      Pulseaudio is NOT a failure lol

      ALSA, Esound, OSS etc were always conflicting pre-pulseaudio. Sometimes you’d get sound, you’d always have to screw around with the sound server settings in different apps between KDE and Gnome apps, and gaming was a disaster. Even just using XMMS2 was a pain with Netscape/Firefox

      It was a huge step forward, even with initial teething problems.

      The only thing it didn’t solve was low latency (for music production), and that’s really the huge advantage of Pipewire. It did take a while to get there though…

      In Xfree86 days, Linux wouldn’t have had a future if PulseAudio wasn’t released. It was one of those critical elements (along with Compiz, XrandR, DRI, Udev, PackageKit and Steam) which actually made Linux competitive against OSX and Windows at the time

      • nintendiator@feddit.cl
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        8 months ago

        I don’t know what universe were you living in, but I remember history vastly differently. No app I ever used ever had problems with ALSA, not even gaming. XMMS or XMMS2 (or Audacious even back then when it was kinda starting) never had issues with Firefox. Only when PA was introduced I started losing audio on various apps, losing volume control, or in a few cases apps would cease listing ALSA as a possible audio output while PA was installed.

        I killed PA on my machines hard and never had any issues again, and things pretty much only improved once Pipewire arrived other than having to change one (1) configuration file, and it was properly documented.

        • Auzy@beehaw.org
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          8 months ago

          This was back in kernel 2.2 / 2.4 days when Xfree86 still needed a configuration file

          If you used DE’s like Enlightenment or multiple desktops simultaneously, it only caused more issues.

          Also, you HAD to configure what sound server you were using often in many apps, and I seem to recall even needing to set a path in some cases to the dev.

          Pulseaudio was only problematic when it was first released.

          You may have had a good experience with sound servers back then, but for the rest of us, it was a lot of additional configuration and messing around

          • nintendiator@feddit.cl
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            8 months ago

            Xfree? Who’s talking about that? I’ve only ever had to use Xorg, and I only ever needed to touch its conf file if I needed to fiddle with the refresh rate of an external monitor. (Compared to that, its “”““modern””“” replacement Wayland doesn’t even start a full desktop session on my machine)

            No, we’re talking about the crap that was PulseAudio, and how ALSA; which is unrelated to XFree, worked almost flawlessly and barely needed any configuration. Formatted my machine several times and remember there was someties a path to the dev (/dev/snd or something like that usually, I think? I sometimes see it thrown around when doing advanced stuff with stuff like mpv) but I was lucky that when I had to edit my file it was for hardware bugs and not for software things. I… think? nowadays that bug is acknowledged for either at the ALSA or the Pipewire level, haven’t delved enough to check.

            Dealing with sound servers on the Linux community does feel like a rarity going-backwards kind of thing: to this day, Firefox for some weird ass-reason dropped ALSA support in favour of PulseAudio. But in Debian, the packaged Firefox versions continue to work with ALSA flawlessly - as if support never was dropped, despite the many versions and changes since. Which suggests me to think Mozilla never actually dropped support, they just flipped a switch somewhere to promote PA instead, which usually comes down to money deals. Mozilla is an expert at that kind of thing.

            • Auzy@beehaw.org
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              8 months ago

              That’s my point. I’ve been using Linux from before xorg existed. Back in those days, things didn’t auto configure.

              Sorry, we’ll agree to disagree here about sound servers…

              Just because audio worked perfectly for you, I assure you, it wasn’t the case for everyone else at the time. Not everything defaulted to OSS or ALSA. So, there was often additional configuration involved.

              And pulse was the only one to convince everyone to drop their sound servers and provide a way to support them all. That’s a huge accomplishment. Whilst it could be argued that ALSA had the potential to do so, maybe… But they didn’t

              It was such a pity they didn’t include JACK support though, because that seriously held back the Linux Music production community (which is mostly seamless in Windows and MacOS)

      • nintendiator@feddit.cl
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        8 months ago

        Shoddy workmanship due to how eager those devs are to push their beta testing software on Production, yeah. And honestly looking back, coming from Fedora, doesn’t surprise me.

    • I_like_turtles3@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Pipewire: works.

      Does it have jack support? I have a network sound server and I use both linux and windows clients. I solved windows clients with the jack plugin.

      • Piece_Maker@feddit.uk
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        8 months ago

        Pipewire’s got fantastic JACK support. You can even run standard JACK control GUI’s like Carla on top of it and expect them to work just like they would on regular JACK

        • SolidTux@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          I do still have some problems with freewheeling. Ardour always crashes on exports when using the Jack interface, but everything works over the Pulseaudio interface. It might be an Ardour thing, but it doesn’t occur when actually running Jack. So something is actually different with Pipewire.

      • nintendiator@feddit.cl
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        8 months ago

        No idea if that’s the case but they certainly seem to have been made with the same mentality. FOSS has for a while suffered of what I call the “Icaza pest”, trying to bring the Microsoft way of design and programming into Linux. The results and troubles this causes abound, considering eg.: the fart that has been Gnome themes since 3.x, or the Gnome posturing back in the day that “users have no right to change their settings” when modernization of Gnome-terminal, and how it’d interact with stuff like screen and dtach, were discused.