 When it comes to audio on Linux, I've had a very interesting experience over the last five years And I think that that Probably applies to a lot of people in the Linux community audio tends to be a little flaky when it comes to more esoteric things like Bluetooth and audio interfaces and DAX and things like that when you start adding in Complex things past just headphones Audio on Linux can get a little messy. So it's not surprising that things go wrong From time to time. So for many many years pulse audio was the thing, right? It was the piece of software that came after also that was purported to make Linux audio good and It was a journey. Let's just say that Like any journey it had its ups and downs pulse audio has a very how should we say? Interesting reputation when it comes to stability and usability and whether or not it's any good or not, right? It's not something everybody has their own opinion on pulse audio now Like with any other piece of Linux software There is a successor to pulse audio and that is pipe wire now pipe wire and I have a very interesting Relationship, let's just put it that way it's not a good relationship up until now or at least it hasn't been because Every time in the past when I tried pipe wire, it would always Mess with me it would do something where it just wouldn't stop working for no apparent reason the biggest one is that very often I would experience a very odd bug and That is that it would cause my microphone to become an input and an output now I've talked about this on the channel before This is a microphone. It's obviously an input device. It is not an output device It has no microphone jack on it at all the old microphone that I used before did not have no microphone jack on it So it was only and solely would ever be an input device There's no way could possibly be an output device yet pipe wire often saw it as an output device Now since I last made my last pipe wire video I've been using fedora full-time and fedora uses pipe wire as its audio software it's the thing that it uses and Honestly, it was my biggest fear about switching to fedora because I just had such a poor experience with pipe wire in the past on Garuda on regular arch Linux on fedora itself, you know, I just had a really bad Experience over and over and over again with pipe wire So I was very worried five months ago when I switched to fedora that pipe wire was going to screw me over again So color me surprised that five months later or however long it's been it's been in quite a few months that pipe wire has been really good now as I'm probably going to title this video I'm probably gonna regret saying this because just the minute I say that pipe wire has been good on my system It's probably going to fail again be an update or something that I do wrong So I'm probably jinxing myself, but over the last however long it's been five or six months Pipe wire has not had a single Thing go wrong on my system now. I've had audio problems in that time But those can't be really late at pipe wires feet It really can't I've had some interesting problems with my new audio interface as experienced in my last video I'm hoping that I got it fixed and that I'm not recording another video with really bad audio But we'll see about that when I start editing this So I've had some problems with that I've had some issues where the sources change and stuff like that and that might be pipe wire issue Just might be also that I have too many Inputs and output devices on my computer. It just doesn't know which one to choose as default So overall pipe wire has been very good And that has led me to make this video because my last pipe wire video stated plainly that pipe wire wasn't ready and That was based on personal experience I had a lot of people in that video say well, you know, it's worked fine for me for a long time and it you know It's just you're not using it right basically is what a lot of people said and it's possible that I wasn't using pipe wire Right, you know at that point. I am not nor have I ever proclaimed myself to be a Linux expert. I'm a Linux noob. I even described myself as an eternal Linux noob I don't know everything not even close. I know very little. I'm an idiot. It's you know on my byline So at that point, it's completely possible that I was using pipe wire wrong I wanted to make this video because I I'm at the point now where I'm willing to admit that pipe wire is ready for daily Use by pretty much everyone and I'm late to this party because a lot of people a lot of Linux youtubers have Already made this conclusion, you know months or maybe in a year ago But I'm here now to proclaim that pipe wire seems to be ready for most use cases now I have a fairly complicated Audio setup at least what I consider complicated But I know for a fact that there are many people out there that have way more complicated setups people who use Many devices and are creating music and all this stuff and they have many different audio devices that they're trying to connect to the computer I cannot speak to whether or not pipe wire will react well in that situation So it's possible that if you have a super complicated Audio setup that pipe wire may not be useful for you at this point and pipe wire still may be the option for you But for people who are like me, maybe you have an audio interface so you can use a microphone You have a DAC or something like that. Maybe you have an audio stack You know, it seems to be at least at this point pretty much everything is where it needs to be and that place is That it just works when it comes to audio and I've made this comparison before Audio is like a steering wheel on a car. You don't want it to do anything special It just has to do its job and if it does its job, that's all it needs to do It doesn't need to have special features doesn't need to have a whole bunch of buttons It just needs to steer the car when it comes to an audio server slash audio solution for Linux All it has to do really well is Control the audio system. Now. I still believe that pipe wire tries to do too many things I think that they're trying to shove too many things into it because it has something to do with video 2 So if you've ever used Wayland before, you know that pipe wire controls some of the screen capture capability that you can use in Wayland and That's confusing is all get out because it's supposed to be for at least my original impression Was it that was supposed to be just for audio, but it's not it's audio and video So it gets a little bit confusing, but when it comes to audio at least Everything seems to be in a place right now where it just works It's finally at the point where it's a really good steering wheel for your audio needs and At least it has been for me now I have Experimented with this on multiple different machines in different audio setup. Some of them uber simple Some of them more complicated like the one that I'm sitting in front of and it all just seems to work now I can't say whether or not this experience translates outside of fedora and Ubuntu Fedora and Ubuntu seem to have this down fairly well And I think I'm at the point where I can say for me personally for me personally Pipeware works on every computer that I own Very very well, and I can finally use it without worrying that it's going to eventually break on me during an update It's been very stable for Half a year now, and I'm happy about that. So now that I've made this video Pipeware is gonna break because that's just the way things work for me So if I'm silent on videos for the next three days, you'll know why But I just wanted to make this video because it's it's there's I think when it comes to this kind of thing Just like with pulse audio pipe where has a reputation and it's gained a reputation because when it first came out and Distro started switching to it. It had such a hard time getting traction and a positive reputation because so many things Went wrong. It seemed like every time there was an update something broke And it felt like beta software which is why I always asked why are distros switching to this thing and making it their default audio stack When it just doesn't work all the time stable because that's what you want with Audio on Linux you want it to work. It has to be stable. It's it's the it's one of the prime functions of a computer your audio has to work and For a long time pulse audio had this up and down situations where sometimes it was really good Sometimes it was just flat out broken and there were always breaking things and coming out with new features and stuff like that And it was just a bad experience and that led to a reputation of it being not ready and Perpetually not ready. It's very much like Wayland Wayland has a reputation of not being ready I'd go so far as to say it's still not ready in my opinion But pipe wire has that reputation too and it's going to be very hard to shake that That's the reason why I wanted to make this video is because for me it just feels now like it's it's ready I'm not sure if it's going to be ready for everyone else But at least for me personally it's still it feels like it's ready and like I said It's very much like pulse audio pulse audio had the same situation where I had a reputation That it just could not shake and the question kind of remains whether or not pipe wire will ever be able to shake It's reputation of not being ready and I guess we're just gonna have to wait and see on that So if you have thoughts on pipe wire, this was kind of a rambly video I just wanted to talk about audio for a little while you can leave those comments in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me in mastodon or odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on page on a page on comms last Linux cache You can support me on libera pay or YouTube those links will be in the video description as well Thanks everybody who does support me on page on YouTube you guys are all Absolutely amazing well to the channel just not to be anywhere near where it is right now So thank you so very very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. I mean all the appreciation ever So thank you so very much. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time