Arch switched months ago, as well.
Why would I want per-app volume? Pretty sure all relevant apps have a setting for that.
> headphone jack detection
What do you mean by this? My headphone jack works just fine with just ALSA and no configuration.
> probably 5 other things I use daily but don't know about
Doubt.
This actually sounds like something that might make me switch to Pipewire one day.
The rest of your comment seems to indicate to me that you have some kind of professional audio setup? Or is it something that might be interesting for the rest of us, too?
Yes, but that's not related to the comment. I tried to avoid my fancy use cases. It's more that through this I know that pipewire makes some scenarios trivial that people normally wouldn't know how to achieve or would spend lots of money on (https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/ for $100+)
The rest is just basic usage. For example, I'm in a video call and want to add just the browser's sound output to the call, but still hear it myself. With pipewire, that's "open (your preferred audio graph tool)", "drag and drop from browser to zoom". Runtime change, multiple sinks, including app sink.
I also don't like how you have to compile your own AUR frontend. You would think that would be pre-included, since it seems to be one of the star attractions of Arch.
I wasn't a fan of how long it takes to compile things. I also remember having to figure out dependencies manually, it doesn't just do it all for you like apt/dpkg.
I don't fully trust it any more than random AppImages from GitHub releases, to be honest, since I've heard there has been malware in the past, and compiling yourself gives zero protection.
Unless you are going to read through tens of thousands to millions of lines of code, you're still just trusting whoever put the package up there, and hoping you would have heard about it if there was a virus. I suspect not nearly as many people go around randomly reviewing code as some might like to think.
It does work, and I can see the value if you want to use things that for whatever reason aren't in Debian.
I actually kind of like the curation effect that Debian has though. If it's in the repos, it gives you a clue about what is popular enough that someone bothered maintaining it. If it's not in Debian and Fedora, it's probably more experimental than I'd like it to be.