docs Slackware request - pipewire
 

Howdy good folks.. Been seeing some people talk about pipewire here and there, and I wasn't really particularly interested. But by some chance, I became somewhat intrigued/interested recently.

I'm probably fully able to deal with it myself if I really want to. But a starting point I was hoping for was documentation/guide for pipewire on docs.slackware.com, but there is none. It's a somewhat big topic, and of quite some importance, and it would be lovely if someone with the knowledge would document pipewire on docs.slackware...

Just things like getting started, setting it up, configuring, things one need to know about it, Slackware specifics etc etc

I know, all these things can probably easily be found around the web easily, but it would be nice if it was on the slackdocs page too. It's always nice if someone with the experience documents it properly. If anyone would be willing. Thanks in advance if you are!

Here's a place to start.

Pipewire in Slackware works out-of-the-box, except the fact that is not the default multimedia server yet
You can enable/disable it through startup scripts, in replacement of pulseaudio:
/usr/sbin/pipewire-enable.sh
and
/usr/sbin/pipewire-disable.sh

Apart from that I don't see any reason to provide any documentation, in addition to official documentation or the great ArchWiki. No need to reinvent the wheel
And as @mlangdn said, the dedicated thread is also a good starting point (even though a 30-page thread can be scary...)

If you want something related to DAW, AlienBob provides a nice tutorial on his blog
https://alien.slackbook.org/blog/con...-use-as-a-daw/

Side note:
There is no Slackware-specific documentation for pulseaudio after its inclusion in 14.2 either

I asked what I asked, and I don't need any help personally. But thanks.

In fact, you do

If I read your message between the lines, you want to start documenting Pipewire, and you want to know if anyone is interested in helping you with this project, right? :D

And if you need jack, there's an entry in /etc that's needed, along with rebuilding, enabling jack. :) I think it takes less than 5 minutes to build. (About as much time as is needed to go refill my coffee mug.)

In a way yes.. I could do it myself, but as you probably know by now, I never tried Pipewire. I could certainly get it up and running and document it myself, but I think it would be better if someone with Pipewire experience documented Pipewire on Slackware and their experience with it. There are lots of people like that, and their experience is valuable, is what I'm saying.

Actually, you're wrong also. I don't want someone to help _me_ document pipewire, I want someone to do it for me instead :rolleyes:

So, you use Pipewire? Why? And how does it affect you? Are there any weird quirks? Anything partiular you need to know? Things you need to do/not do?
These are the kind of small things that make it better for an experienced pipewire user to write a guide for it. Even if I was to do it, I wouldn't have anything useful to say even in an introduction on the topic.

But hey, why even bother with Pipewire? I just found out a few days ago by coincident, why one might want to ditch pulseaudio and start using Pipewire instead.

Literally, I don't use it but the system does
I just enable it, and it just works
The same way that I compile my own kernel, but I don't use it as such

As I use a full plasma wayland session, it needs pipewire
And it works very well with all my BT devices

That's it

A comment like "I don't use it but the system does; I just enable it, and it just works" does not bring the discussion forward. Slackware does not enable Pipewire by default, and there is no documentation in the OS on how to enable it.
This topic is a request to write an article which describes how to enable Pipewire, what are the caveats, why should I bother, etc. You @marav may never read documentation and things come easy to you, but there's a slew of people who need a piece of text to guide them and get some reassurance that what they are about to do won't mess up their computer beyond repair.
To be honest - I would be one of the readers of such an article. Slackware sound works for me out of the box - why bother with Pipewire?

And don't point me to a forum page please. There's a docs.slackware.com for a reason.

There are forums for a reason as well.

Slackware current is a dev branch of Slackware stable
People must be aware that they have to deal with things that are not officially documented yet (but it's in changelog though, like everything new in current)

Nobody needs to participate in this thread, and it's not suppose to start any kind of controversy, and it's not an invite to a discussion. It's just a simple request, nothing more, nothing less.

If you by chance read it and want to document, great, and thanks! If not, perhaps just opt out.. If you added useful info about pipewire here, I'll say thanks to that too, as I might have to document it myself in the end, and that info could be useful as part of that.

Thanks in advance for sharing ;-)

I would never have asked if I wasn't willing to do it myself (also). Perhaps I should have mentioned that in the first post.

Let's start it and call for help
That's how open-source projects work anyway

Some guys here will probably be glad to contribute ;-)

I used pipewire for a few days. It is quite easily uninstalled, which I found to be its greatest feature.

Since there is some info for pulseaudio, see https://docs.slackware.com/pulseaudi...h&q=pulseaudio i think that the question for a similar article for pipewire, is valid.
(and yes, Slackware 15.1 is expected to ship with grub as a default with a new type of generic kernel, thus no initrd needed thus more ideas for updating the docs)

This documentation is obsolete since the inclusion of pulseaudio in Slackware 14.2 in 2016

Yes. In fact, the transition to pulseaudio as default, is mentioned there https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:mu...io_non-default
Over the years, i have found the docs.slackware to be a very very helpful site of reference and source of info, side by side to this forum. (but of course, a wiki and a forum are different things)

A few months ago, I was trying to find a post I had made in a thread on this forum, with some information I needed in it. I just couldn't find it, I tried everything, looking through a bunch of threads and posts, but I never found it. Again a few days ago I needed to find that same info, and by a stroke of luck, I actually found it.

Both a forum and docs have their uses, which supplement each other. Quite alot of people want to make slackdocs be one of those good sources of (Slackware) GNU/Linux information, and quite alot of people have put effort into that as well. It's not a dead cause by any means, and Slackware as a distro is kind of unique in that it often offers distro agnostic methods. I'd encourage as many to contribute as possible, any day.

In my view Slackware was forced to "upgrade" to pulseaudio by a combination of Bluetooth and numerous applications, especially Firefox, wishing to offload any responsibility for audio and just let Pulse "wave the conductor's wand". I used that analogous reference because it is rather typical of Lennart Poettering's admiration of Apple OSX to use containers everywhere controlled by an all-powerful server to create a hand-holding userland experience like Apple and Microsoft. In his defense, pulseaudio does that reasonably well for those to whom audio is insignificant, commonly accepting the noise and latency penalties that are inherent to onboard audio chips and pulse. Since RedHat devs were expecting the IBM buyout that would benefit rapid deployment to workstations this has worked quite well for that environment.

However pulse complicated audio performance where audio is more important than simple Workstation environments require. Pipewire has been called "Pulseaudio 2.0" for good reason. It is already substantially superior to Pulseaudio in both the workstation environment and with excellent tradeoffs that benefit serious audio work including recording and editing and by even incorporating video controls and integration opens up the market for professional film-making and editing. For the more casual desktop user Pipewire simply sounds better and handles automation better but is less resistant to the desires and needs of the more serious audiophile.

Note: The Pipewire version on Slackware Current, o.3.84, is a very substantial improvement over version 0.3.44 in Slackware 15.0. Some are calling the previous 0.3.81 essentially Pipewire RC1.0. You can see a nice breakdown changelog here

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comme...0_rc_released/