PipeWire doesn’t need replacement, which can’t be said for its predecessors. PulseAudio, OSS and raw ALSA had their shortcomings. PipeWire blows Windows audio out of the water in my opinion
Yeah, they all had their shortcomings, which meant they had to be replaced instead of evolved, because in the Linux community it is extremely hard to evolve a project in a better direction, but creating a new project is easy, and even getting that project into distros can be easier than evolving older projects.
Unfortunately this means that rather than being natively backwards-compatible, you end up with a tower of cards of compatibility layers which tend in my experience to collapse…
While you might have a point somewhere, I’m not sure it applies in this particular case.
PulseAudio was or still is (I don’t know actually) developed, but you don’t just change a system’s architecture.
creating a new project is easy, and even getting that project into distros can be easier than evolving older projects.
I think this downplays the achievements of PipeWire. Not only is it, contrary to what you write after, backwards-compatible; but if such a project was easy, why aren’t more people / companies doing it?
In my opinion, PipeWire turned Linux systems from being last in multimedia to maybe first place even. Remember capturing the screen or a window before? In fact PipeWire was only extended to audio because the design proved itself so well, so it actually did evolve. Just not from audio to better audio, but from video to video and audio. Saying that starting such a project [edit: is easy] might be technically correct, but then doesn’t make any point.
PipeWire doesn’t need replacement, which can’t be said for its predecessors. PulseAudio, OSS and raw ALSA had their shortcomings. PipeWire blows Windows audio out of the water in my opinion
Yeah, they all had their shortcomings, which meant they had to be replaced instead of evolved, because in the Linux community it is extremely hard to evolve a project in a better direction, but creating a new project is easy, and even getting that project into distros can be easier than evolving older projects.
Unfortunately this means that rather than being natively backwards-compatible, you end up with a tower of cards of compatibility layers which tend in my experience to collapse…
While you might have a point somewhere, I’m not sure it applies in this particular case.
PulseAudio was or still is (I don’t know actually) developed, but you don’t just change a system’s architecture.
I think this downplays the achievements of PipeWire. Not only is it, contrary to what you write after, backwards-compatible; but if such a project was easy, why aren’t more people / companies doing it?
In my opinion, PipeWire turned Linux systems from being last in multimedia to maybe first place even. Remember capturing the screen or a window before? In fact PipeWire was only extended to audio because the design proved itself so well, so it actually did evolve. Just not from audio to better audio, but from video to video and audio. Saying that starting such a project [edit: is easy] might be technically correct, but then doesn’t make any point.