on 12 Jan 2025 (few days ago) i made the switch: I got rid of PulseAudio; I had various issues, eg: I have the habit to play my big music collection placed on an USB 3.0 HDD: the audio was processed by PulseEffects and plyed by Strawberry: I always had problems: audio glitches, little scratches, hiccups, expecially when I opened options in Strawberry (eg for changing the album art of the files).
Another thing is about Firefox: randomly, from time to time, Firefox used to completely freeze (despite the fact that I donβt play anything from Firefox, because I use the extension open-in-mpv:
This because my Ivy Bridge system works better if I force the hwdec=vaapi (H264): set in /home/username/.config/mpv/mpv.conf
However, with PipeWire, Firefox no longer hangs/freeze.
Now with PipeWire + EasyEffects, the audio is extremely perfect: stable, reliable and good (EasyEffects works so much better compared to PulseEffects), however I had to increment the audio buffer and disable the suspension:
in /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf:
default.clock.quantum = 2048
default.clock.min-quantum = 2048
default.clock.max-quantum = 2048
in /etc/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf
default.clock.quantum = 2048
default.clock.quantum-limit = 2048
default.clock.max-quantum = 2048
default.clock.min-quantum = 2048
in /etc/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/alsa-vm.conf
api.alsa.period-size = 1024
api.alsa.headroom = 2048
in /etc/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/51-disable-suspension.conf
session.suspend-timeout-seconds = 0
To made the switch, just do: sudo pacman -Syu manjaro-pipewire
and reboot