[Jnr]

Yes, but people learned from issues that pulseaudio had and then came pipewire. Everyone is happy now.

I don't know about the philosophical aspects, but from pure technical point of view systemd brought some order into the mess. Before systemd it seemed like most distros were barely holding together with duct tape. Systemd standardized a lot of things.

I am fine with a little bit of controversy if the result is a much better desktop OS experience for the user. And as a relatively long time Linux user, I can certainly say it is much better now than it was 20 years ago.

[Avshalom]

Important to people being happy now is that Lennart Poettering didn't write pipewire.

Also having a bunch of things barely held together with duct tape is part of the philosophy.

[account42]

> Yes, but people learned from issues that pulseaudio had and then came pipewire. Everyone is happy now.

Yes, I'm very happy that it mutes my audio when I accidentally unplug my headphones (something which I never asked for) and then often fails to unmute them when plugging them back in, something which requires digging up alsamixer to fix because pulse/pipeware-based GUI tools are being lied to about the output not being muted.

I'm also especially fond of having to open the audio settings app to change audio from one display output to another because some very smart person decided to group all display audio (which are separate ALSA sinks) into one output with different profiles.

But lets not forget that it at least simplified configuration. So much that GUI tools basically don't let you configure shit at all and you need to use one of two (yes, one was not enough) turing-complete configuration languages to accomplish anything slightly non-standard like giving outputs are better name than what your display manufactures cat produced while walking over his keyboard or hiding some of the bazillion useless audio devices that you might end up with somewhere in your PC.

And then of course it still has the PA-innovations like audio randomly stopping for no reason at all until you restart the daemon.

Meanwhile ALSA with an up to date default dmix configuration worked just fine.

[Jnr]

When it comes to incorrect profiles, I suggest making a pull request to alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf with correct configuration. I had similar issue with my audio interface a couple years ago but it was quickly merged and now it works better than on Windows or macOS.

Before that I did have custom config, it was not that hard to set up, there are great examples and explanations on Arch wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire