Is Pipewire ready for daily use?

Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.
Maybe I’ll take the plunge and see how it goes.

Thanks you all :slightly_smiling_face:

Sure, but there’s no tray icon on GNOME and KDE probably already has something for this. :wink:

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I’ve been using Pipewire for exactly 2 weeks now on Plasma + Nvidia Proprietary (no wayland). YouTube videos play and pause just fine. Since you’re on plasma, I also use KDE connect and it still play/pauses just fine. I just tested completely turning off my displays while sleeping the computer and turning them back on before waking it. Audio output was not impacted on the jacks, but display audio disappeared from the audio tray. It can be re-enabled in the configure audio devices menu without issue. I have been listening to music for several hours at a time and never encountered issues with my wired audio.

Bluetooth

Currently, connecting and staying connected with my buds (Soundpeats H1 BT5.2 on aptX and Intel 9260 BT5.1) is a pain. Pipewire does support it, but it’s not entirely documented: Pipewire Wiki Bluetooth Configuration and Archwiki Bluetooth on Pipewire are the only real resources I’ve found that don’t involve asking. It seems the pipewire people know it though pipewire gitlab issue. Some things I’d really like aren’t implemented either. Bluetooth needs improvement for my needs. sudo systemctl restart bluetooth solves a few of my issues immediately.

tldr: Pipewire migration from Pulseaudio has been smooth. Disregard bluetooth if it’s irrelevant to you. All other features I use are at feature parity to Pulseaudio or better (don’t need configuration beyond activation/toggling).

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I’ve been testing pipewire version 0.3.27 for more than a week now. (XFCE with 5.12 kernel) No problems so far, it works much better than PulseAudio. Pipewire even fixed a very nasty issue I was having on PulseAudio: Bluetooth sound and microphone at the same time - #7 by mynewlaptop

I heard that Fedora is migrating to Pipewire. I recommend Manjaro do the same.

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Fingers crossed. Taking the plunge, will let you know how it goes after a few days.
Thanks.

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Issue here: A buffer in Pipewire?

@nam1962 I cannot answer this.
However I am reporting that all’s well between me and Pipewire. Happy to have taken the plunge.
Thanks to all who have given me words of encouragement.

I’ve been using PipeWire since March and I have to say that it is not ready yet to replace PulseAudio. Some annoying bugs here and there (according to their bugtracker), for instance I have been affected with a broken auto-switching between speakers and headphones on jack plug in/out. Too annoying to tolerate it. I think we should let Fedora users test it further, no need for haste. As with Wayland, those who want it are free to enable it and enjoy/suffer then.
PS: I don’t think Manjaro should be a testing site for every new feature invented by RH.

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How to switch fully to pipewire ?

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install the manjaro-pipewire package and reboot

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I’m suprised by this because I found pipewire to be much more stable and reliable than PulseAudio. I suspect people have become accustomed do PulseAudio’s many many quirks and have working solutions around them.

Had some issues :

sudo pacman -S manjaro-pipewire                        ✔  1m 8s  
[sudo] password for marko: 
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...
:: manjaro-pipewire and manjaro-pulse are in conflict. Remove manjaro-pulse? [y/N] y
:: pipewire-pulse and pulseaudio are in conflict. Remove pulseaudio? [y/N] y
:: pipewire-pulse and pulseaudio-bluetooth are in conflict. Remove pulseaudio-bluetooth? [y/N] y
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: removing pulseaudio breaks dependency 'pulseaudio=14.2-3' required by pulseaudio-equalizer
:: removing pulseaudio breaks dependency 'pulseaudio=14.2-3' required by pulseaudio-jack
:: removing pulseaudio breaks dependency 'pulseaudio=14.2-3' required by pulseaudio-lirc
:: removing pulseaudio breaks dependency 'pulseaudio=14.2-3' required by pulseaudio-rtp
:: removing pulseaudio breaks dependency 'pulseaudio=14.2-3' required by pulseaudio-zeroconf

These 5 packages need to be removed first:

pulseaudio-equalizer
pulseaudio-jack
pulseaudio-lirc
pulseaudio-rtp
pulseaudio-zeroconf
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Switched about a month ago, and I’m more than happy. Bluetooth works incredibly reliably, always connects to my Bluetooth speaker both after reboot and resume from suspend. Also, latency is considerably lower.

How did you measure latency?

Try if you can change that in pavucontrol. If not, file them an issue here: Issues · PipeWire / pipewire · GitLab

What audio codec were you using prior?
I was having trouble with bluetooth in pipewire initially. I disabled the bluetooth service, reinstalled the bluetooth service, and re-enabled the bluetooth service to get it working. Now I do agree, it works perfectly for playback, and there isn’t significant latency, but it’s also not significantly different from pulse.
My prior complaints about bluetooth features/compatibility still stand. Those clearly don’t apply to your speaker, though they’re still worth mentioning.

My evaluation of the Pipewire latency is totally unscientific and anecdotal. I watch quite a lot of drum videos on YouTube and with Pulse this was quite frustrating. The sound of the stick hitting a drum came when the drummer lifted the stick midair and not when hitting the drum. After changing to Pipewire video and sound are in synch.

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If you use Bluetooth or multiple inputs & outputs, I’d say “no”. I tried it for a couple of months, but had to switch back to pulseaudio. I had issues around my headset mic not being detected or not producing any sound when using HSP. I also found that while using my Bluetooth headset I was unable to use the mic on my USB-C webcam (for the double whammy). In the end, I got fed up of having to start preparing for videoconference meeting 20 mins ahead of time. At the moment, pulseaudio just works, while pipewire is flakey. If you’re not using Bluetooth then your experience may differ.

I’ve gone back to pulseaudio for now:

Encountered issues with my bluetooth headset while resuming from standby. Seems the whole bluetooth stack is dying. Wasn’t able to reconnect the headset (Sony xm3) without a reboot.

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