 Okay, so today I want to talk about pipe wire and I've talked about pipe wire many times a lot of the time is on the podcast so some of you might not have heard my opinions on it or you have just heard snippets here and there and videos where I've dropped sarcastic comments and I have to say that I have a very strong opinion on pipe wire my opinion is that it's just not ready yet and I don't understand why it's being pushed on people but I understand that some people out there have had really good experiences with pipe wire they have found that it is a good replacement for things like Jack now those people who have had that experience I can understand that perhaps pipe wire is a fantastic replacement for Jack and it's easy to configure and easy to use I don't personally think that's saying that much because anyone who's actually looked at the Jack program and the Jack front-end and all that stuff you would understand that Jack is the most complicated piece of software to ever exist so saying something is easier than Jack is not really saying all that much but honestly all that is beside the point because what we want to talk about is pipe wire and for those of you who don't know pipe wire is a complicated piece of software because it's not only a piece of software that sits on top of pulse audio in some situations it can replace pulse audio in some situations but it also deals a lot with video and screen capture for things like OBS and what have you so when you say pipe wire is the future what you're saying is kind of complicated because it's meant to do quite a bit of stuff and my argument through experience of actually using pipe wire has been that it's just not ready for certain applications now if all you ever do is log into your boon-to system watch some YouTube listen to some music whatever you're gonna have a fine experience with pipe wire for the most part that's not taxing its abilities at all I have no experience with using pipe wire for music development or anything like that so I have no thoughts on that process or any experience of how good or bad pipe wire happens to be all of my experience with pipe wire comes from video creation so I use things like simple screen recorder and OBS in audacity and cating live and stuff like that so content creation in that realm is where I have all my experience and from that experience I can tell you that pipe wire is not ready so I've had several comments saying that I'm just an idiot not using it right that's obviously their opinion and I find that to be analogous to Apple's complaint when the iPhone 4 was having problems of you're holding it wrong I don't personally think that the stuff the problems that I've had with pipe wire are user errors so let me explain things that have gone wrong with pipe wire for me personally now let me go ahead and say this a lot of the problems that I've had are less to do with pipe wire and more to do with app compatibility with pipe wire so for example I've noticed for whatever reason at least on my system and in my experience that pipe wire does not interact with things that are flat pack all that well so for example if you download the flat pack version of OBS which is the officially supported version of OBS on Linux it doesn't always work with pipe wire very well specifically with audio capture one of the things that I experienced with that multiple times is that for whatever reason it will take my output devices which is right now I have a DAC connected to my computer which is it's a DAC amp combo thing some cheap that I just bought it from Amazon it does its job and a lot of people have reviewed it very well it works fine under every other circumstance but for whatever reason a lot of times in that scenario where I'm using a flat pack with pipe wire of OBS Linux has decided then to treat that output as an input so when I see the bars in OBS the audio level bars that I have set up and I talk it will show me talking in the output level which is obviously not right that's not the way it's supposed to be now you could just blame that on OBS it be perfectly valid to do that but I've also seen it in other places like audacity so I know that it's not just an OBS problem now the thing about audacity is is that I also use that as a flat pack so I don't know if it's a flat pack problem and just the way flat pack interacts with pipe wire or something else I don't know I can't answer that I'm not a developer what I do know is from my experience is that in those situations pipe wire doesn't work now outside of the whole flat pack thing I've also had similar problems where for whatever reasons devices connect and disconnect for random reasons and it's not as if they're being physically disconnected they're actually still connected to the computer it just shows them connecting and disconnecting over and over again just like seconds apart from each other just on off on off on off don't know what's going on there either and I can only assume that that's pipe wire problem because again pipe wire is what I'm using now the thing is is that you kind of have to use pipe wire because trying to uninstall pipe wire from Arch is like trying to install snap from Ubuntu it's possible but it's not that easy things like MPD rely on pipe wire for whatever reason even though MPD has been around for 25 years maybe even longer it should not rely on pipe wire but it does so removing it is almost impossible another experience with pipe wire that I've had a problem with is that it doesn't work very well with Kaden live some the things that I do in Kaden live require me to be able to see the waveform in the timeline so if I want to cut out some silences or if I want to cut out some going throughs for those of you who've been watching my videos I'm trying to cut down on the words going through all the time you know if I want to cut that stuff out I need to be able to see the exact places where the audio levels have gone up for those words right so I'm going to cut that stuff out the problem I've been experiencing lately and again this may just be a KDE problem or a Kaden live problem is that the timeline shifts so you can for instance hear me talking but the wave line the waveform is completely flat there's no like waveform there at all and if you zoom out the waveform will then like snap into place where it's supposed to be and then all of a sudden the waveform is correct again it's really weird again could be a KDE live problem but I haven't experienced that on systems that don't use pipe wire another thing that I've seen in Kaden live is sometimes the audio levels aren't there at all where it actually shows a waveform that is like like maxed 100% so it sounds like it's completely static for the whole thing it doesn't sound that way but it looks like that it's really hard to explain I wish you had an example to show you it's really weird it happens all the time and again it's something that I've never seen happen on a system that doesn't have pipe wire installed it doesn't happen all the time but again it's something I've seen so when I say pipe wire is not ready I say pipe wire is not ready for me okay so I've said this multiple times you may have a fantastic experience with pipe wire it may be something that you just had a wonderful experience with and you have just totally abandoned pulse audio and it's just it's completely changed your life that may be true for you for me it's not ready yet it's broken in multiple situations now again I don't know whether it's not it's pipe wire or it's just these applications in their interaction with pipe wire that's causing the problem it also could be a hardware thing where pipe wire just doesn't like my particular hardware that's possible but the problem is is that I've seen other Linux youtubers say some of the exact same things so I know Brodie Robertson had some issues with pipe wire way back I don't know if those have been fixed I think he said that pipe wire is now good for him I'm not sure I know ebus central has made several videos on pipe wire I've heard several other Linux youtubers talk about how pipe wire does not work very well for video creation this is not a Matt you're an idiot type of scenario this is something that has affected many people and coming out and saying that hey you're an idiot doesn't isn't really you know the right way to handle this right so for me personally pipe wire is not ready yet and the thing I don't understand is is that the Linux community historically has been very slow to adopt things so for example even Wayland has been in production for 15 years maybe not that long probably since 2011 so we're probably looking at nine years what whatever the date is whatever the amount of time is it's been a long time since Wayland has been in production if you watch some of Brian Lenduk's old Linux sucks videos he's been talking about Wayland and mirror for a long time when he's talking about you know why Linux sucks in xorg is old and all this stuff so those software technologies have been around for a long time and it's just now so many years later that Wayland has finally gotten to a point where people can use it and even then it's still not you know good for everybody like Wayland is not something that everybody can use if you have a Nvidia graphics cart it's still in its early days and even for people who don't have Nvidia graphics card if you're trying to capture video on your screen or do anything complicated with Wayland it tends to break and a lot of that is because of pipe wire but that's kind of beside the point the point I was trying to make is that traditionally the Linux community is very slow to adopt new technologies we're very much resistant to that type of change when we're using something that is standard something that we always want to use and have been using for many many years when something new comes along we're resistant to change to it for whatever reason that hasn't been the case with pipe wire every distro that I know or at least the vast majority of them have been very eager to switch to pipe wire now some of that is because pulse audio has caused so many problems over the years distros like Ubuntu and Arch have both switched to pipe wire and while they still use it over top of pulse audio in some cases it's still there and it's still causing problems for some people now maybe it's not the vast majority people the vast majority people may be very happy but that's okay those that vast majority people are free to create YouTube channels and tout the benefits of pipe wire all they want for me personally it's not ready yet so I don't quite understand the eagerness of distros to switch to it but even then I don't understand why it has become something that has to be so hard coded into the distros so if for example four or five years ago you wanted to just use also in Arch Linux you could do so and remove pulse audio fairly easily now it would require you to remove several dependencies and stuff like that but it was fairly easy to remove pulse audio and just use also if that's what you wanted to do these days if you want to remove pipe wire you're going to have to remove just an absolute ton of dependencies and it's not like there's like six or seven dependencies and then that's it but each of those dependencies then are dependencies for other things so it's kind of like a never-ending spiral until you've removed like half of your system now that's probably exaggerating a little bit but the point is is that in order to remove pipe wire it's pretty much impossible without removing every single piece of audio software on your computer and that's not a good experience because if you don't want to use pipe wire getting rid of it is damn near impossible and the sad part of it is is that there's not a ton of distributions out there that aren't switching to it so I know like things like some versions of Debian you can still use that don't have pipe wire I know you can you obviously use Gen2 without pipe wire if you want to and I'm sure there are several others but the point is is the mainstream ones have all switched and that means that you either figure out workarounds for using pipe wire on whatever distro you've chosen or you use one of those other distros and that's not always the best choice to make so for me personally where possible I've stopped using flat packs for certain applications so even though the flat pack of OBS is the official version of OBS on Linux I have decided just to use the one that is in the arch repository which for those of you use OBS know that it's way far behind like it's not even the latest release it doesn't have all the features compiled into it so you don't get things like the YouTube integration or the YouTube chat integration or the Twitch integration none of that stuff is in the arch version and it is in the flat pack version which is why I switched to it but it doesn't work very well all the time with pipe wire so I've had to use the one in the arch version I still do use the flat pack version of Audacity and that's simply because I need a 3.0 version of that or higher because I have several templates that have the new file format and the version that comes from the arch repose is still 2.0 something and uses the old file format so I've still used that luckily at least so far not gone some wood here the pipe wire that is on arco right now seems to be working fine with Audacity sometimes the levels in Kden live and stuff get all messed up like I was talking about but I've been able to kind of work around that but yeah so I understand again that my experience is not everyone else's experience that's kind of the point is that for those of you who are out there championing pipe wire slow down on it just a little bit and understand that not everyone's situation not everyone's experience is the same as yours and also don't just say that because something goes wrong for someone it automatically makes them an imbecile it's not necessarily the case now sometimes things can be user error but it's not always the case sometimes the software is just not good for them at least so that's it for this video if you have comments you can leave those comments in the comment section below you can follow me on twitter at Linuxcast you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast before I go I'd like to take a moment to my current patrons Robert Sid Devon Patrick Fred Kramer Maiglin Jack Snank Jules D.B. several Linux Garrett Samuel KB TGB Mitchell J-Doug carbon data Jeremy Sean Odin Marnie Andy Ross Eduardo Merrick Kamp Joshua Lee Peter a crucible dark winnest X primus in PM thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time