Pipewire is newer and emulates PulseAudio so that it can be used as a drop-in replacement. There's literally a command called pipewire-pulse related to this.

It makes me wonder if they really have both installed or are mistaking Pipewire's emulation for an active PulseAudio installation, and so it's just Pipewire that's acting up.

I'd say reboot, but being in space might be one of those times where that's a non-starter. In which case, they're going to have to get their hands dirty unpicking system hooks and trying to reattach them all again as and when Pipewire's working again, assuming it doesn't do that automatically.

I never had a problem with either Pipewire or real PulseAudio back when that was current. I had motherboard sound physically pop, requiring the purchase of a separate sound card, but never a driver issue, so I can't even imagine what might be going on.

Yes it’s a joke referencing the two Outlook instances issue, but for Linux people

OSS came first, then got replaced by ALSA after it became proprietary.

PulseAudio is a userspace audio server to which programs connect. It manages audio settings per app, then sends everything to ALSA. JACK is the same but with a focus on low latency.

PipeWire is a modern drop-in replacement for both, and also has support for video on Wayland.

I'm still waiting for the latency to be viable for playing guitar with an audio interface.

Ohhhhhh the newbies don't remember EsounD (Enlightenment Enlightened Sound Daemon). Basically, it was an attempt at doing PulseAudio-esque stuff way back in the OSS era. Which is to say, it just supported software mixing of multiple audio sources, because OSS usually only allowed single process to output audio. EsounD was janky and didn't work well, obviously. Probably the neatest thing about it was that it exposed the mixed output stream to any other app, so that made visualisers much easier to make (edit: another thing that newbies in this day and age don't realise, but I cannot emphasise enough how crucial visualisers were for the late 1990s / early 2000s music experience). ALSA basically supported hardware mixing (if available) out of the box, so of course it immediately became my favourite.

That’s the thing about open source. Someone always thinks they can do better

They don’t have the same goals.

JACK is for professional audio.

OSS and ALSA are kernel audio drivers, they’re the most powerful of them all but extremely low level. Everything else, like pulseaudio/pipewire are just higher-level interfaces that feed ALSA audio.

Pulseaudio and pipewire are sound servers.

So really it only took two tries:

OSS -> ALSA

Pulseaudio -> Pipewire

This is a meme, sir.

I hope that's like a personal laptop or something. I'd hate to think we shot people into space on something that's running windows for a critical system.

Can't believe Linux would do such a thing

Being in IT with windows 11 is awful.

"Why isn't my mic/audio working?"

Me: "Idk, restart the computer"

"That fixed it. I don't understand, it was just working yesterday. Why did it stop working?"

Me: "Windows 11 sucks..."

Not to mention how awful it is being in a teams call as the IT guy and my mic isn't working because, again, windows is ass

I have it piping audio to three different devices at the same time. And believe it or not they're all in sync... most of the time.

Does the buzzer count as having sound?

Happened to me on Mint as well. Never resolved it. Using Nobara and Fedora now and never had any audio issues. Seems to be something with how Mint handles audio as I see people mention this a lot.

That's not a pipewire problem, that's a systemctl problem.

Failed to connect to user scope bus via local transport: $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR not defined

The error means systemctl --user can't reach your user's D-Bus session because the required environment variables aren't set. This typically happens when you've switched users via su or sudo rather than logging in directly, because htose don't initialize a full systemd/PAM session. It could also be that your session wasn't properly initialized by systemd-logind or a number of other things. Try spawning a proper user session:

sudo machinectl shell your_username@

and try the systemctl command again.

Yeah, it was working fine but then it got really hard to use pulse. Just when it was stable, we get a few good years before having to switch to a new unstable thing, since pulse lost support.

Some Mediatek chips are doing this, that is bt audio cutting out while WiFi doing things. Nothing fancy, 1080p video on YouTube will cause that.

Hm? Removed pulse, installed pipewire-pulse, ran pipewire && wireplumber && pipewire-pulse as user and everything just works. Except that my cheap bt-inear sometimes cause a crash of bluetoothd (and that one should restart by itself but whatever) but that's not pipewire's fault.

And also wireplumber, for good measure

You should alias it to what. That way, when the computer says something but you can't hear it, you just type what and now you can.

If you're using, Debian, Mint, or Ubuntu try updating the kernel to the most recent version

When I type p I get "plasmashell --replace --no-respawn" because I have to reload plasmashell twice after reboot to get all my widgets in working state lol

I did alias rpipe='systemctl --user restart pipewire'