zlacker

Pipewire has made all of my audio issues on Linux go away, at this point. Maybe it's my hardware (a high-end Dell Latitude that is Ubuntu certified) but it just f*cking works!

I'm on Arch, so I find I tend to have fewer issues than with Ubuntu (due to the latter always being on some ancient version). Seriously though when I switched from Pulse to Pipewire... I rebooted and I've never had any issues since!

Now, my biggest complaints are around i3 and X11. I get some flickering, and display management is a little painful. But those are largely self-imposed because of i3. I haven't tried switching to Wayland yet because it's good enough for me.

At this point, it's been years since I've used a Windows PC for work and... I'm so damn happy about it!

>>freeqa+(OP)
If you like i3 but want to try Wayland pain-free - Sway uses i3's config file syntax, so you shouldn't have to change anything to try it out :)

>>freeqa+(OP)
Switched to wayland today because nvidia drivers were killing performance when I plugged my 4k monitor into my laptop. Barely usable under X, fixed under wayland. Also wayland was able to independently scale the 4k monitor and the laptop monitor, which was nice. Found a couple niggles but so far what I need is working. (Using KDE.)

Worth a try.

>>pojntf+U3
Caveat emptor: your normal apps might struggle still.

Some common things have wayland native replacements but it might be jarring.

Redshift (automatic Color temperature change) -> gammastep

Dunst (notifications) -> mako

Rofi (launcher) -> idk I just used kitty+fzf with some special options.

>>freeqa+(OP)
> Now, my biggest complaints are around i3 and X11. I get some flickering

I've started experiencing flickering in non-compositing window managers on Arch a few months ago (I mainly use Openbox, although I've tried dwm too) after some update. My solution was just to run `xcompmgr &` at the session startup.

>>dijit+gA
there is a wayland replacement for rofi called wofi. i didn't use rofi for anything particularly intensive so it was a drop in replacement for me

>>dijit+gA
wlsunset was a lot simpler for me to get to work compared to gammastep, which I thought had too steep a learning curve. I only need it for the yellow light, thought.

>>dijit+gA
Dunst is native wayland since early 2021[1]. Instead of rofi, bemenu[2] is nice too.

[1] https://github.com/dunst-project/dunst/issues/264

[2] https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu

>>pojntf+U3
I can’t do else but praise sway. Long lost perfect WM.

>>freeqa+(OP)
If you're tired of waiting for next Ubuntu release and like living on the edge, you can switch to "Ubuntu+1", or always using the next release while it's being polished. Just replace "groovy" with the codename of your current Ubuntu release:

    sudo sed -i 's/groovy/devel/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

Then as usual:

    sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade

>>helmho+DL
Oh interesting. I don’t know if I set anything specific but I usually just invoke it with my lat/long and it seems to work.

Will look at wlsunset too, maybe it’s a better UX. :)

>>freeqa+(OP)
I actually contribute to PipeWire development in some small aspect (reporting bugs, debugging issues), and PipeWire is far from trouble-free. The recent 0.3.41 contained a bad commit which causes PulseAudio apps (RetroArch, QEMU, Orca) to infinitely buffer audio in xrun or something (fixed in git). And PipeWire has some issues switching profiles when you plug and unplug devices, and sometimes picks the wrong speaker/headphone port(?) when rebooting and then enabling a device, and the latency algorithm has issues as well (under default settings, it takes up to 0.6 seconds to hear certain libcanberra notification sounds). And it reuses IDs exposed to PulseAudio apps, which causes race conditions (eg. crashes, incorrect stream-to-app mappings in plasmashell) in PulseAudio apps. "Write" race conditions (eg. changing app volume) are unresolvable due to the Pulse protocol, though apps can be fixed to avoid "read" race conditions by ignoring stale data from IDs which have been deleted and recreated.

I still use PipeWire because routing app audio is cool (and not possible AFAIK on PulseAudio), and I can usually avoid the bugs well enough in practice. But it's not "just f*cking works" in many cases.