[HN Gopher] PipeWire 1.0.0
___________________________________________________________________
PipeWire 1.0.0
Author : shallow-mind
Score : 146 points
Date : 2023-11-26 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gitlab.freedesktop.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (gitlab.freedesktop.org)
| lupusreal wrote:
| Much love for Pipewire for bringing "just werks" audio to the
| Linux desktop.
| shmerl wrote:
| Good milestone. Switching to PulseAudio over Pipewire from stock
| PulseAudio fixed audio issues in Cyberpunk 2077 for me.
| egamirorrim wrote:
| Shame my strix soar soundcard just stopped working when I
| switched to Ubuntu 23.10/pipewire
|
| Doesn't feel like a worth successor to pulse audio from here!
| shmerl wrote:
| Just a guess, but Ubuntu might ship outdated pipewire packages.
| ric2b wrote:
| On 23.10 they use pipewire 0.3.79 which I think is the latest
| stable release before this brand new 1.0 release.
| imp0cat wrote:
| I'd wait till the next LTS.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| It's such a massive relief to be using something that wasn't
| written by Poettering. PulseAudio was a train wreck when it was
| first released. Others took it over and got it working. Now with
| pipewire, it does things a lot better than PulseAudio ever did.
| ratsmack wrote:
| But now, what are we going to do with systemd?
| galcerte wrote:
| Unlike PulseAudio, dbus, and other userland components, it is
| perfectly possible to have a Linux system which works with
| most software without systemd. runit and OpenRC are two of
| the most popular init alternatives, which are _just_ inits,
| and nothing else, unlike systemd. You might argue you have to
| use logind and udev, but that has been spun off into elogind
| and eudev. There is also seatd as an alternative to elogind,
| which is quite big itself.
| Levitating wrote:
| Just use it? I am still confused why systemd is supposedly
| something that needs to be fixed. Like all major
| distributions "accidentally" switched to it.
| ratsmack wrote:
| They all switched because of commercial interests, not
| because everyone loved it.
| kaba0 wrote:
| These takes are just ridiculous. Debian, with a more
| democratic system than any country on Earth, voted
| _twice_ over the issue, overwhelmingly supporting the
| support of only systemd. How is that commercial interest?
| Then arch decided for the same thing independently. I'm
| sure arch linux is the core interest of every commercial
| vendor, right?
|
| Just accept it, package maintainers had enough of the
| absolute shitty state of init systems. Systemd solves
| this very complex problem elegantly, giving some standard
| userspace can depend on.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| That's quite true I'll give you that. But there are still
| issues with it. It keeps swallowing up bits like resolver
| and others. It should only do one thing well.
| kaba0 wrote:
| It only swallows those things up if you consider KDE
| swallowing up painting programs like Krita. Systemd is
| both a program, a collection of programs.
| zlg_codes wrote:
| Systemd adherents cannot seem to get past this deficiency
| in the software's messaging.
|
| Same with Wayland. "it's not a program it's a protocol"
|
| Still sucks, still is a thorn in my side and gets in the
| way.
|
| Systemd is an attempt to consolidate the OS/service layer
| into one thing. Compilation options don't mean shit when
| every component is tightly coupled to systemd, its
| journal, dbus, or some other quackery.
|
| Systemd would have been better as an entire distro to
| itself.
|
| But as usual, people cannot handle the idea of running
| anything other than what's shoved in their faces from
| _corporate_ programmers.
|
| If I wanted corporate software I'd buy Apple or
| Microsoft.
| kaba0 wrote:
| So as usual, we get nothing useful or remotely objective
| from "systemd-haters".
| zlg_codes wrote:
| Your terms are impossible to meet. The moment I reach one
| goal, you'll invent another. Not worth it my dude.
|
| I am doing something about it by researching ways to
| excise Red Hat from as much of the tech stack as
| possible. Can't do much about the kernel, but every layer
| above it is moldable.
|
| I don't care to provide 'usefulness' to you; if you're
| not paying me why would I give up any value?
|
| It was an arrogantly managed project using the guise of
| standardization to bypass people's social tendencies.
| People are stupid, so they fell for the 'only consider
| the code, not our social fuckery!' Hook, link, and
| sinker.
|
| It really opened my eyes to how ignorant and passive a
| lot of techies actually are. They're happy to slurp up
| whatever's advertised to them as the better thing.
|
| Systemd runs my current laptop and I hate having to dive
| under the hood for anything. In a sysvinit, runit, or
| OpenRC system, I can achieve things quickly and don't
| need a book's worth of corporate style documentation to
| operate my damn system.
|
| Systemd still doesn't support a one-time script on boot.
| You have to hack together a unit for that. Most other
| systems just run an rc.local script in /etc!
|
| Binary logs are only useful if systemd is running, and
| only that version of it too!
|
| Good luck understanding journalctl output. It doesn't
| capture everything.
|
| Long story short, systemd has not improved a single area
| of my computing life. I guess I can ogle at a boot time
| graph. But the main goal seems to be for systemd to take
| away knowledge of the lower levels of the stack.
|
| Like it or not, open software ecosystems are resistant to
| standardization by default.
|
| Systemd and dbus and friends would not have bothered me
| if they weren't coupled with weird ideology about One
| True Linux or other crap.
|
| Systemd never solved problems for me. I'm sure it solves
| many business problems but none of them apply to me.
| ric2b wrote:
| Those are separate binaries under the same umbrella
| project name, you're not forced to use resolverd if you
| just want the init system.
| mike_hock wrote:
| The decision in Debian didn't come that easily. The tech
| committee was locked in a filibuster over systemd for
| ages and the votes were 50-50. Then the chair cast his
| tie-breaker vote in favor of systemd and everyone on the
| other side flipped their shit.
| kaba0 wrote:
| The only remotely controversial option was whether they
| should "explore other alternatives" or not.
| zlg_codes wrote:
| Yeah, Debian's decision wasn't brutal and ugly. It was
| all nice and out in the open, no flame wars!
|
| Debian's TR process doomed them to systemd. I don't think
| they're capable of making an independent decision. Too
| many hands were in that cookie jar and the corporatists
| won, for now.
|
| I'm waiting for the software wars to begin. Software
| that's so opinionated it'll check if PID1 is systemd and
| tells you 'fuck off' if so.
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| Ah yes, the commercial interest of Arch Linux
| eternityforest wrote:
| Seems like the commercial interest was caused by a lot of
| people loving it.
|
| Most hate seems to be from enthusiast/tinkerer types who
| want to hand maintain highly customized systems.
|
| Systemd is great for ople who just want a commodity OS,
| maintained by pros, and kept stock.
| mike_hock wrote:
| I don't like its hard dependencies on glibc (specifically,
| with no support for other libc's) and dbus (I'd've preferred
| Poettering going full nih and developing his own RPC
| protocol).
|
| Other than that, systemd provides a polished experience, so
| if you want to displace it you'll have to produce something
| equally polished and compatible with existing unit files,
| just as systemd was able to consume ye olde sysv startup
| scripts.
|
| The only other contender that I'm aware of that isn't just
| one massive design flaw, is openrc, and it's somewhat
| inferior to systemd.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Many (or even most) of the issues with pulseaudio were actually
| sound _driver_ bugs only being resurfaces by pulseaudio, as it
| was using them in a more complicated matter. It is pretty
| unfair to blame Poettering over anything wrong in your life, as
| many of you do, for some reasonx
| ric2b wrote:
| How does pipewire work around those driver issues? Could
| pulseaudio use the same techniques but there was just no
| development capacity for it?
| kaba0 wrote:
| These were only true of pulseaudio in the early days of it.
| They are solved for good, by "simply" fixing the most
| common drivers. But in general, it couldn't have been
| solved any other way.
| ric2b wrote:
| It's quite sad that one person can get this level of hate
| online just for releasing open source software.
|
| If you don't like his software why are you using it? If it's
| because your distro uses it shouldn't you try to be convincing
| them to switch to your preferred alternative, instead of
| calling out the developer by name on public forums?
| mrlonglong wrote:
| I don't.
| zlg_codes wrote:
| It's amazing how much mental gymnastics fools will do
| defending the guy. Have you met him? Have you seen his smug
| writing style? Have you seen the talks that he interrupts to
| take the stage for himself?
|
| Associating with that has a social cost. The funny part is
| some chodes like to pretend we should only focus on the code
| and not the people behind it. Those are people who like to
| hide their agenda in their interpersonal interactions.
|
| His software has a habit of making its way into the common
| Linux stack, too. Too many coincidences and too much
| arrogance for someone who should've just shut up and made
| good projects instead of 'gently pushing'.
|
| He capitalized off his fuckery and now works at Microsoft. So
| much for Poettering and free software! Lmao
| wholesomepotato wrote:
| This needs to be said: Every single thing Poettering touched
| was huge improvement. A great hero of Linux userspace
| architecture.
| iscream26 wrote:
| Truly the be-all-end-all for Linux audio servers. All the ease-
| of-use of Pulse without any of its issues.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| That pipe wire can often meet or beat pro-audio JACK for
| latency is so elegant & nice. Defeating that compromise of
| PulseAudio seems like the crowning achievement to me; there's
| not a lot of other faults or defects I felt with PulseAudio,
| and I say this as someone who has had sound servers with half a
| dozen audio cards (mostly USB) I've run off a system, as
| someone who has streamed PulseAudio from one system to another.
|
| The technical sophistication of PipeWire is almost purely made
| possible by Linux improving, by the availability of DMA-BUFs
| for shared memory inter-process work. This wasn't possible when
| PulseAudio (nee Polyp) was being created; the kernel couldn't
| do that then.
|
| On top of this modern base, pipewire has done a fantastic job
| generalizing it's architecture. It's also designed to pipe
| video. It could conceivably be used to pipe input events, or
| other arbitrary streams too. This is a cool upgrade that I hope
| we see more leaning into over time; I hope PipeWire someday
| becomes so pervasively used for so many reasons that it is even
| more known, tapped, used, & loved that dbus, the current inter-
| process nexus of FreeDesktop.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| > The technical sophistication of PipeWire is almost purely
| made possible by Linux improving
|
| I'm not sure about that. I guess improvements in ALSA have
| contributed. But PipeWire was created by none other than the
| guy who rearchitected GStreamer's foundations after GStreamer
| had been brittle and prone to crashing for years. I don't
| think that there was a better person in the Linux ecosystem
| to do it. It's the second system effect without featuritis,
| like when some of the Unix people created Plan 9.
|
| Personally, I was not happy with PulseAudio, and I'm very
| happy with PipeWire. Great, great stuff.
|
| I say that as both a user and somebody who created a
| prototype for a sound system for an embedded platform on top
| of PulseAudio that was, AFAICT, abandoned because it just
| couldn't deliver some things. PipeWire was on the radar at
| the time but too much in its infancy to use back then. That
| stopped being the case years ago.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I've had nothing but issues with PulseAudio, leading me to
| disable it and use plain ALSA (with dmix) on basically
| every Linux system I've used. I'm excited that it's being
| replaced, but I no longer use desktop Linux very often.
| odiroot wrote:
| For me the most awesome part is support for both consumer audio
| and pro audio profiles at the same time. No messing about with
| JACK etc.
|
| Everything just works. It might not be as perfect as JACK
| (getting some rare xruns) but it's just so convenient!
| GloomyBoots wrote:
| I don't have anything bad to say about PipeWire. It's really been
| a breath of fresh air. And, as much hate as it gets, so was
| PulseAudio when it came out. Good to see things moving forward.
| ric2b wrote:
| I did have some Bluetooth issues that made my headset unusable
| if I was using a Bluetooth mouse at the same time, but that
| issue seems to have resolved itself a few weeks ago so now I
| don't have any complaints either.
| vonjuice wrote:
| I had issues with audio production, but not anymore. I think
| this "not anymore" is the key takeaway. It may or may not be
| ready for _everyone_ right now but it keeps improving.
| zlg_codes wrote:
| PulseAudio got hate because of the trouble it caused. PipeWire
| seems less likely to create gigabytes of logging without
| reporting issues.
|
| There are reasons that things get opposed. It isn't just some
| irrational juju feeling.
| dither8 wrote:
| Pipewire for the first time got Pulse and JACK to work together
| for me. Bravo.
| sroerick wrote:
| 10 or so years ago I spent a long time customizing a DAW
| workstation on Arch using JACK and Ardour and a lot of other
| utilities.
|
| It had a steep learning curve and a lot of configuration but I
| loved the freedom JACK granted to wire applications to each
| other.
|
| Is anybody using PipeWire in an audio engineering setup? Or would
| JACK still be the preferred method here?
| vonjuice wrote:
| I was using JACK and tried switching to PW at various points
| and always encountered issues.
|
| Last year I took another chance and made a fresh Arch install
| on my laptop and went with PW (on previous attempts I tried to
| switch on an already running system). I had no issues, and in
| fact it solved some issues I used to have on jack.
|
| Then I did the same on my desktop. I had problems setting up my
| microphone, but I managed to solve it. Now I have two, very
| minor issues: sometimes bitwig takes a bit to start the audio
| engine, or I have to restart the program; and sometimes my
| audio stops working when I unplug my zoom h1n while the system
| is running. I rarely do the latter so it's barely an issue.
| jampekka wrote:
| There are patchbays for PipeWire that allow for wiring like
| jack. qpwgraph seems to be the most functional. Can use pw-cli
| too.
|
| Actually it allows wiring also jack applications to pipewire
| applications and pipewire to jack. I use e.g. "pw-jack ardour"
| to run ardour and launch pw-jack jconvolver and route inputs
| and outputs with qpwgraph.
| zlg_codes wrote:
| I'll wait for software that's not built for Red Hat/IBM/GNOME,
| thanks.
|
| XDG has gone off the rails with 'portals' and other needless
| obfuscation of their desktop stack.
|
| If I had the financial security I'd write better alternatives,
| meant for communities instead of whatever Red Hat wants.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-11-26 23:01 UTC)