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Dumb question: what did the Pipewire developers do that makes it so much better than everything else on Linux?

Sound has been an absolute disaster area on Linux for decades and it seems like the Pipewire guys just flat out solved it. (I would say "suddenly", but Wim Taymans has been working on this directly for almost 7 years and worked on Gstreamer before it)

What did they do so much better and differently?

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In my case, the big advantage is the automatic insertion of resamplers between different clock domains, meaning you can connect anything to anything. Pulseaudio tries really hard to make sure there is only one clock driving any connection graph, so that's why there's no arbitrary connection support without loading things like module-loopback that add the resampling themselves.

Another thing that helps is that in some ways PipeWire is less featureful than PA. For example, it limits the max audio buffer size to ~180ms which means it doesn't have to implement rewinds, one of the buggier features of PA (with the downside that power consumption can't ever be quite as low as PA).

Some of the pipewire devs are old pulseaudio and jack devs. They are fixing their mistakes now. With a common goal, at last.

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