Re: Switch default from PulseAudio to PipeWire (and WirePlumber) for audio

[Emanuele Rocca <ema@debian.org>]

On 2022-09-29 01:41, Simon McVittie wrote:
> It's fine to control Pipewire via PulseAudio's IPC protocol (that's what
> gnome-control-center and gnome-shell do!) and if that doesn't work,
> then it means pipewire-pulse is not fully doing its job.

Is it fine, or is it a necessity? What I understand from your reply is
that (by design or de facto) PulseAudio's compatibility layer is *the*
way to control Pipewire, at least in gnomeland.

If that is the case, it may be a good idea to let our users know. A
note in the wiki is probably enough! Someone else could be confused
when they find out that PulseAudio is still around despite the migration
to Pipewire. I'm happy to do the writing, once I figure out what to
write.

> Switching to a different sound server implementation shouldn't require
> rewriting every graphical and TUI/CLI mixer/control utility, if the
> compatibility layer is good enough.

Agreed. When we discover the irreparable design flaws of Pipewire and
come up with a replacement though, it would be nice to have *one*
compatibility layer, instead of one per sound server implementation
replacement. :-)

> If you prefer to use CLIs, pw-cli is a low-level CLI for Pipewire, and
> wpctl is a somewhat higher-level CLI for Wireplumber; they're analogous
> to PulseAudio's pacmd and pactl.

Very nice, thank you.