As someone who uses Linux audio extensively, I was really excited to see PipeWire gain traction over the past years. I am, however, much less thrilled about WirePlumber being pushed as the canonical PipeWire session manager, essentially turning PipeWire into another brick in the systemd wall.
Perhaps I should rephrase: My problem isn’t with WirePlumber as such (I haven’t tried it yet), but the with the fact that it requires systemd.
Are there options any besides WirePlumber and pipewire-media-session? Anything that runs on a runit-based system and allows me to at least somewhat conveniently route audio between applications would do, really.
WirePlumber does not require systemd. For example, in Gentoo, we have WirePlumber being used on both OpenRC and systemd installations. I use it on both.
It has supported elogind for a few months - notably around the time the default changed/the push towards WP began, so it’s not like it happened afterwards.
I also think that it works without a logind implementation at all.
Ha, I completely missed that. I last tried to set up PipeWire in December and couldn’t get WirePlumber to work on Void. Seems that was right around the time when elogind support was added.
Anyway, thanks a lot for this information!
Edit: Just added qpwgraph to my setup for easy routing, works like a charm.
Interesting. For me it on one update simply replaced pulseaudio with pipewire, which is how I even learned about that project. Must have been added as a dependency then or something like that. Was surprised because it was even newer than it is now back then.
As someone who uses Linux audio extensively, I was really excited to see PipeWire gain traction over the past years. I am, however, much less thrilled about WirePlumber being pushed as the canonical PipeWire session manager, essentially turning PipeWire into another brick in the systemd wall.
Is there a session manager you prefer?
Perhaps I should rephrase: My problem isn’t with WirePlumber as such (I haven’t tried it yet), but the with the fact that it requires systemd.
Are there options any besides WirePlumber and pipewire-media-session? Anything that runs on a runit-based system and allows me to at least somewhat conveniently route audio between applications would do, really.
WirePlumber does not require systemd. For example, in Gentoo, we have WirePlumber being used on both OpenRC and systemd installations. I use it on both.
It has supported elogind for a few months - notably around the time the default changed/the push towards WP began, so it’s not like it happened afterwards.
I also think that it works without a logind implementation at all.
Ha, I completely missed that. I last tried to set up PipeWire in December and couldn’t get WirePlumber to work on Void. Seems that was right around the time when elogind support was added.
Anyway, thanks a lot for this information!
Edit: Just added qpwgraph to my setup for easy routing, works like a charm.
Void has wireplumber but no systemd, so…?
Subscribing to learn the answer. I don’t use a session manager at all on my own systems (Void Linux, no systemd) Interested to hear about options.
Wasn’t it used in Arch earlier than that?
I use it in Arch, but I had to install it explicitly.
Interesting. For me it on one update simply replaced pulseaudio with pipewire, which is how I even learned about that project. Must have been added as a dependency then or something like that. Was surprised because it was even newer than it is now back then.
It might be that it is the default selected implementation for satisfying pulseaudio dependency now.
Which would be sensible; pulseaudio is crap.
Before pipewire, I used jack with a fake alsa device fed into jack for compatibility with non-jack apps.