Pipewire by default?

George

Will pipewire be enabled by default in solus?

DataDrake

I think the consensus amongst most distro maintainers is that PipeWire will eventually replace PulseAudio and JACK, but that the stability and feature parity isn't quite there yet. As for Solus, we are very much in the "wait and see" camp.

George

DataDrake Thanks for answer

Staudey

Canned response 😛

edit: Nevermind, it's not copy and paste. Shame on me!

DataDrake

Staudey So, I'm so consistent in my messaging that it looks effortless. Nice.

abimagnus

Whats good in Solus is that all supported package for Pipewire is installed by default and i just switched to it..so far so good..especially in bluetooth codecs and headset which support mSBC wideband speech !

I'm using Solus KDE.

andiskufi

abimagnus Can you please provide info on how we can do that. I am also on Solus KDE.
Thanks

George

andiskufi

Enable (without having to run under sudo) the user PipeWire service and socket with: systemctl --user enable pipewire.
When continue with the user PipeWire PulseAudio: systemctl --user enable pipewire-pulse.
And the PipeWire Multimedia Service Session Manager: systemctl --user enable pipewire-media-session
Disable the PulseAudio socket and service with: systemctl --user disable pulseaudio pulseaudio.socket
Install the pipewire-jack package if you want to test JACK support.
Reboot

From https://dev.getsol.us/T9694

abimagnus

andiskufi Yup the same steps mentioned by @George also the guide mentioned below..
https://www.guyrutenberg.com/2021/03/11/replacing-pulseaudio-with-pipewire/
systemd service are already in place for Solus..so you can skip that !

andiskufi

abimagnus George
Thank you both for your info. All worked great.

andiskufi

George abimagnus As I said on my previous reply it works great. I just noticed when I restarted my PC that the services does not start on boot and I have to run the commands in order to have sound. How can I make them start on boot so I don't have to run the commands every time I restart my PC?

abimagnus

andiskufi Hmm weird did you enable the below services and disable pulse audio?

systemctl --user enable pipewire-media-session.service
systemctl --user enable pipewire pipewire-pulse

For me its sticking at boot and works perfectly !

andiskufi

abimagnus Yes I did everything as you said. Anyway it's fine as I had to disable pipewire as I had issue when I was running a game and at the same time playing youtube, I did not have sound on the game. Thanks anyway for your help.

YuriTheHenrique

If I switch to pipewire, just for testing, is there any application like pavucontrol for it? I know KDE can change audio/application output by itself, but gnome can't.

ReillyBrogan

YuriTheHenrique Pipewire implements the Pulseaudio APIs. You can literally just use pavucontrol with it.

As for gnome extensions that work well with Pipewire I use the following (both compatible with GNOME 40):
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/906/sound-output-device-chooser/
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3499/application-volume-mixer/

YuriTheHenrique

ReillyBrogan Thanks, I'll be testing pipewire this weekend then.
I just use pavucontrol because I have more control over which program is using what output... sometimes different sources has to be on different outputs. 😅

[deleted]

YuriTheHenrique Based on what I've heard on IRC, it seems Pipewire may conflict with Wine/Proton gaming. So if you experience issues, check if changing to Pulseaudio works 🙂

kaktuspalme

@George Thank you very much for the steps. I can finally use my Bluetooth headphones. With pulse I couldn't use LDAC or AptX, though it should have worked with the newest pulse. The configuration via pavucontrol works very well, so no need to change the tools already familiar with.

George

I think this is a very expected feature right now

codewizard1975

Ok, I may be a little new on asking this question and sorry if its been asked...

Right now in its current state is there any benefit to switching from PulseAudio to Pipewire when all I do is watch movies and listen to streaming music using speakers or wired headphones?

kyrios

codewizard1975 Ok, I may be a little new on asking this question and sorry if its been asked...

Hello & welcome ! 🙂
There is a search field on the top navigation bar so you can check if a question was asked already and not be sorry anymore 😛

Brucehankins

kyrios 😂

codewizard1975 Pipewire does offer some better codecs from what I understand, not sure if that's it. I followed this guide and switched because I figured why not and wanted to tinker some.

Staudey

codewizard1975 Pretty sure the Bluetooth audio codec support is better with pipewire. So if you have wireless headphones it might be worth it.
Then there are advantages for JACK users, and special audio setups, but nothing for the average user that I can think of off the top of my head.

George

codewizard1975 yes, first of all, thats small latency with volume you will not feel that the scene lags behind the sound for a second, secondly: excellent volume in Bluetooth headphones