It’s more like JACK for desktop. PA was never good, just obvious bad design.
I’d have to disagree with that. It wasn’t perfect and there were issues for many people at the beginning, but it united everything properly.
Before then (in xmms days), don’t forget that audio in apps constantly didn’t work, and the sound servers often conflicted. It was far from a seamless experience.
But, pipewire I agree doesn’t seem to have any downsides and finally fixes from what I felt was the last major issue (low latency)
PA works on most case tho. Can’t deny all the good it did.
Also, is JACK any good?
Didn’t work on my last two sound cards, and always had latency problems for many people.
JACK is for profesionals. If you need to take an input from an instrument, run it through a software filter, and output it immediately. Or if you need to output from one program to another to another. Etc. Usually that means small buffers and a lot of cpu usage. Not really for normal desktop users. Grab a specialized distro like ubuntu studio and try it, if you want.
