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Comment by BrightGlow | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed a lot of smaller creativity/productivity apps are not available in distro repos. They're far too niche to get attention from distro packagers. However a lot of them are in Flathub and they work on any distro.

I find it curious you make that comparison about Pipewire because to me, Pipewire is just an incremental improvement for audio, not really changing anything on a giant scale. Most pro audio apps were already using Jack and got all the benefits of that type of system. Pipewire only makes it so they could connect to the odd Pulseaudio app, which is pretty rare. Not meaning to downplay it or anything. It is still a pretty good improvement, but its major contribution is what it does for video, not audio.

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jack has been a consistent source of pain for musicians and people that need proaudio.

its great useful software but most folks don't have the skills to get it working without drama and breaking pulse etc.

Linux loses many independent minded folks over jack drama. It's a shame but this is a new day I think.

Pipewire gives a great out of box experience that should just work on whatever distribution they choose. That's not incremental improvement for people wanting proaudio.

I can't agree, ever since jack2 I actually never had any problem getting it to work with pulse. You may be thinking of jack1. Pipewire does make it easier to do this though.

PipeWire handles ALSA much, much better than jack ever did on any of my machines. Oh, and handling audio permissions via Unix groups made me want to rm -rf /

I don't know about alsa, I don't remember what happened when I tried that years ago. Yeah Unix permissions is bad, Pipewire is definitely better there. The security is a big improvement but I also wouldn't say that's anything revolutionary.

> the odd Pulseaudio app, which is pretty rare.

Unless you count Firefox?

Well I don't usually need to connect audio from Firefox directly into a DAW or synthesizer. And technically that could still be done with Jack, it's just a bit harder to do because you have to create additional pulseaudio sinks first.

I was just referring to the fact that it is no longer possible to run Firefox on ALSA without PA. And I only mentioned it because it annoys me.

You may want to try this project: https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse

But I don't recommend using only ALSA without a sound server on a desktop, the usability of it is pretty bad.

Apulse works for Firefox.

I have found ALSA useable, over many years. But I've never understood the config notation, so my configs have always been pretty cargo-cultish.

>I've noticed a lot of smaller creativity/productivity apps are not available in distro repos. They're far too niche to get attention from distro packagers.

That's what AUR is for.

Sure, but that's one distro.

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