Should bookworm release notes recommend migrating to pipewire

Helmut Grohne helmut at subdivi.de
Fri Jun 23 11:41:43 BST 2023


Hi,

I recently upgraded one of my non-gnome systems and noticed that it
still was using pulseaudio rather than pipewire. To me, this was
unexpected, but I've since learned that only gnome installations migrate
to pipewire by default when upgrading to bookworm.

I had a brief exchange with Simon. It seems that pulseaudio is on life
support and pipewire is where things happen. I guess that before too
long, people will not like to support pulseaudio anymore and ask users
to migrate to pipewire. Any kind of wayland session should prefer
pipewire to enable screen sharing. As anecdotal evidence, I've
personally migrated most systems from pulseaudio to pipewire and it was
a "it just works" kind of experience. Great work.

On the flip side, Simon notes that pipewire is still in its 0.x phase of
rapid change. There also seems to be anecdotal evidence that some setups
don't just work on pipewire while they do work with pulseaudio.

I think that this situation is something we can reasonably mention in
release-notes:
 * There is a long transition from pulseaudio to pipewire ongoing and in
   the bookworm release, users can choose with ease.
 * If using gnome, we expect upgrades to automatically migrate to
   pipewire.
 * One can switch from one to the other by installing the packages
   pulseaudio and pipewire-audio respectively.
 * Optionally: We recommend migrating to pipewire in bookworm.

Do the pulseaudio and pipewire maintainers agree with all of this? Also
with the migration recommendation?

Helmut




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