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Comment by g15jv2dp | Hacker News Reader

I now have flashbacks to when I tried to get sound working on my Gentoo install 15 years ago. It seems that now everything has changed (wtf is pipewire) and still requires arcane knowledge to get everything working smoothly...

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To be honest, I wouldn't say it requires arcane knowledge these days. When setting up both Arch and Gentoo, I did a bit of research, determined that Pipewire was probably the best for me (because it seems to be largely a superset of the other options), and installed it following the wiki instructions. That's it. I haven't had to configure things in any sort of detail, it just worked smoothly the first time without any config.

Let me guess, you don't have a Realtek controller for audio.

Realtek audio has gotten to a pretty good place on Linux. I've had several over the past few years, and they just work for the most part. Fedora, especially has been a wonderful out of the box experience for audio.

Bluetooth on the other hand...

I must be the only unlucky one because my linux approved motherboard Intel DQ77MK with a Realtek ALC892 8-channel for audio kept switching between front and back panel (although nothing was plugged in on front) on Fedora 39 :( . It does work fine on windows.

Actually now that you mention it, I did have a similar problem on one particular motherboard. I don't attribute it to linux though so hadn't thought of it. It turned out to be a hardware issue (with the motherboard) though. The card kept resetting due to too low of input power. I had hoped a BIOS update would fix it, but it didn't. I have had a couple of built-in audio modules die and stop being seen by the kernel on old laptops.

Honestly I would just buy a USB interface. I got a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 and have been very happy with it.

The only thing I can say is that it does not happen in windows 10.

Do you have any more information on how can it be diagnosed?

The motherboard it does have the latest bios update.

Did you try OSX on the same hardware?

Unfortunately no, I don't think I have the knowledge to try a hackintosh? Also not very sure if the system would be compatible with it. It is something to try eventually though.

what do you think it will happen?

I do have one, whatever HP figured was good enough for their "high-end" elitebooks. Worked perfectly on Arch without any fiddling. Even the mute leds on the keyboard work as expected.

I believe I do, though I'm not certain. I have whatever is built into my Asus motherboard, which seems like it is ultimately a Realtek chip. Not sure though.

Pipewire is a major development that's especially important for Wayland desktop. It was hard to miss unless you haven't used Linux in a long time.

I don't know what Pipewire is as well. I've used Linux daily for 10+ years, but I've never bothered to use Wayland.

Pipewire ends up being used to paper over Wayland deficiencies in some areas, thus why it's important for Wayland desktop ;)

By itself it's essentially grand unification of audio servers that actually works better and is way less... opinionated about the only true way some things works, which was a problem with pulseaudio at times.

Separation of responsibilities is good, instead of having a mix of everything but not well enough situation with X11.

Separation of responsibilities is something Wayland fails hard, by effectively hardcoding coexistence of significant part of display driver, windows management, simple things like windows decorations (which, thanks to Gnome's insistence, are by default only client-side, so your concerns invade internals of client apps!) etc.

Just don't use Gnome. KDE is fine with server side decorations and it's false that Wayland mandates client side ones. Wayland ≠ Gnome and Gnome itself indeed made a bunch of pretty questionable decisions.

But if anything it's X11 that tries to lump a ton of stuff together. Wayland is very minimalistic in comparison. That's why stuff like libinput and Pipewire are part of making a functional desktop.

Client Side Decorations are made effectively essential in core protocol (given that the core protocol doesn't even support existence of "windows"), server side decorations aren't, and some applications will display weirdly because of that.

More over, every "WM" in Wayland's case needs to implement the entire stack, even if it uses a common library for some of it.

And after similar length of development time, I'd say the result is still worse in many aspects than X11, and I say that as someone both using and praising a wayland-based compositor and lamenting that it pretty much locks me more than Windows used to

Well, time to move with the progress. I've been using KDE Wayland session for several years already.

I use i3-wm. I know that there is Sway but it will require some effort to migrate. Also there are fresh reports that Wayland+Sway have problems with NVidia (even worse I have AMD + NVidia). I'd wait till it gets resolved or my current setup stops working.

Not personally using tiling set up, but I think KDE has some scripts for KWin that allow doing that. So you can use KDE for that purpose.

nah I'm okay thanks. X11 still works flawlessly for me.

The main issue is that X11 is an increasingly unmaintained case and all new development happens with Wayland anyway. So as long as you can deal with lack of support - I guess no need to move, but otherwise Wayland with KDE has been well usable for a while already.

Yeah I'll move when I have hardware that really needs it. I use a 12 year old laptop.

I've been a WSL user for years now. Way less effort.

Until vmmem starts using 100% of your CPU and you need to kill the WSL service to get your computer back (without the unsaved work of course).

But yeah WSL is just too easy. Specially with native vscode support it has become a favourite for many developers

If I had been using using linux as main OS in that situation, I would have had to reboot. How is that different?

It's different because this is windows hyper-v (or something related) crashing and bringing down your WSL session with it. A native Linux is far more stable.

PipeWire is drop-in replacement for pshshaudio with additional features (while preserving pshsh part sometimes). Only difference is 15 years ago half of the problems with sound were fixed by uninstalling pulseaudio as it was in early stages full of bugs but still pushed to many distros similar to systemd. Today's pipewire is as easy as uninstalling pulseaudio, installing pipewire, and most of the times it will continue working

To be fair. Pulseaudio in early days exposed tons of audio driver bugs that were since then fixed. Bluetooth audio was barely working back then. Now bluetooth works so well that it makes other operating systems look bad.

Pulseaudio had a great GUI mixer/settings app. That does not seem to come with pipewire and tries to install PA when explicitly installed.

I just install fedora and everything works out of the box.

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