PulseAudio vs. PipeWire - Which To Use?

i switched to pipewire after obs-studio was modified to require it. i saw no reason to run both.

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Should Pulse Audio be removed, prior to installing Pipewire?

Just install manjaro-pipewire. Answer yes to replacement questions. It will remove pulseaudio packages and install the pipewire equivalents in a single transaction.

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But it seems that the sound config on Plasma only supports Pulseaudio and if you use pipewire there is no sound icon on the system tray.

Still got one on mine(KDE Plasma).

No, works fine for me.

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Changed to PipeWire, very good until I try to play the only game I play, factorio. No sound in factorio with PipeWire. Went back to PulseAudio. Now I have sound in factorio again.

Works fine for me. I’ve been using PipeWire on KDE for months.

I don’t even know what I’m using :laughing:

Sound is working everywhere as desired, so I’m fine.

You also get lower latency and support for jack applications, as pipewire and replace both jack and pulse.

Another reason to use Pipewire is better bluetooth codec support. By default, Pulse supports just the SBC codec. Pipewire supports virtually all bluetooth codecs by default.

This is strange, because under EndeavourOS (Arch), where Pipewire is now standard, there is a sound icon in the tray as usual.
Btw, it works fine with my K5 Pro DAC.

I have pipewire installed on Manjaro and still have a sound icon in my tray.

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I - The standard KDE audio volume control is no longer available;
II - We no longer have the audio configuration options (hardware) in the “System Settings”;
III - When we add a new audio device (a bluetooth headset, for example) it does not start to be used automatically by the OS;
IV - The keyboard features/keys for audio control have stopped working.

I’m terribly sorry, but in Arch KDE I still have the icon. How can I fix this? Would that help you to make me stand in the corner and feel all bad? :worried:

It’s also missing the sound icon for me, and I can’t control the volume using my keyboard shortcut anymore. This was after sudo pamac remove pulseaudio && sudo pamac install manjaro-pipewire && reboot

For those that are having issues with missing sound icons, I would recommend branching off and starting a new thread dedicated to this issue to get the proper help and support.

When I created this post it was a comparison between Pulse and Pipewire, not troubleshooting a specific issue.

That’s why you don’t have a sound icon. Pamac removed all packages that depend on pulseaudio. You said yes to that transaction. The correct way would have been just to install manjaro-pipewire, which would replace pulseaudio without removing all packages that depend on it.

Also, it is NEVER necessary to run pamac with sudo. Pamac asks to escalate its own permissions when needed.

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one more reason to use pipewire is HD bluethooth codecs. though stock pulse-audio supposedly supports HD codecs from v15, the additional packaging requirements has made arch drop HD support. (the old pulseaudio-modules-bt doesnot work with PA v15 anymore)

stock pipewire supports HD codecs, and some, than PA v15