Bug#1049418: xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin: Please loosen Recommends, and allow pipewire-pulse as an alternative to pulseaudio
Source: xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin
Version: 0.4.7-1
Severity: normal
User: devel@kali.org
Usertags: origin-kali
Dear Maintainer,
it would be nice if xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin would Recommend
'pulseaudio|pipewire-pulse' instead of simply 'pulseaudio'.
For background: in Kali Linux (a derivative based on Debian testing), we
switched from pulseaudio to pipewire in our flagship desktop XFCE, that
was back in May 2023 [1]. So far so good: sound works great, via the
compat daemon pipewire-pulse. I'm not claiming *everything* works 100%
(I just don't know), but it seems that it works well enough, based on
the feedback we had so far on our bug tracker.
XUbuntu (XFCE's flavor of Ubuntu) also switched to pipewire in version
23.04, back in Apr 2023 [2].
A minor issue, in Kali, is that we still have to install pulseaudio, due
to the fact that xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin depends on pulseaudio. So
pulseaudio must be installed, even though it's not running.
On the same line, we also can't install the metapackage pipewire-audio,
since it Conflicts with pulseaudio, hence breaks the xfce4 metapackage.
Changing the Recommends field of xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin to
'pulseaudio|pipewire-pulse' would solve those two issues, and more
generally it would make life easier for people who want to switch to
pipewire and remove pulseaudio.
Thanks for considering this change,
Arnaud
[1] https://www.kali.org/blog/kali-linux-2023-2-release/#xfce--pipewire
[2] https://xubuntu.org/news/xubuntu-23-04-released/
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