[bayindirh]

I had tons of problems with PA. Jitter, noise, insensible defaults. i.e. Why upmix stereo to 5.1 just because I have the speakers, and why make disabling it an override?

I never used onboard audio, always had some higher end card with more resolution than a bog standard on board audio chip, and PA struggled to deal with them for a long time.

Also if the daemon crashed or needed a restart, it was a dance of restarting with exacting order and other details.

Pipewire is just invisible. It works the way it should and doesn't bend the system to fit in.

[andrewaylett]

Pipewire is invisible because Pulseaudio (PA) exercised a lot of sound stack features, exposing bugs (which were often attributed to PA) and prompting a lot of bug fixes. It wouldn't be nearly as good if it weren't building on PA's foundations.

Pipewire also doesn't need to bend the system to fit in, because the system is already the right shape.

(And I'm perennially annoyed that my work Mac won't upmix to 5.1. I've got the speakers, why only use two of them?)

[bayindirh]

I need to read the ALSA bugfixes because of PA to see and believe that.

On the other hand, I used multichannel audio since the last 20 years or so, on Linux, and it always worked with what I have. First with Live and Audigy, then with an Asus card.

No, pipewire is much more gentle on how it handles and takes the streams from other applications. It doesn't make an heavy-handed attempt to make it is also replacing ALSA and drivers at the same time. It's a much thinner layer and works what it should do. Most importantly it doesn't alter the streams it goes through it.

(Sorry, but upmixing a good stereo sound source to 5.1 is just butchering the sound. The resulting sound stage is an abomination of what it should be. For a musically inclined person (read: ex-orchestra player), it's just torture. It's so wrong on so many levels.)