Comment by bee_rider
5 hours ago
PipeWire is like 10 years newer than PulseAudio. It probably had a chance to learn some lessons!
IIRC before PulseAudio we had to mess around with ALSA directly (memory hazy, it was a while ago). It could be a bit of a pain.
PipeWire was also made by a guy with a lot of multimedia experience (GStreamer).
ALSA was kind of OK after mixing was enabled by default and if you didn't need to switch outputs of a running application between anything but internal speakers and headphones (which worked basically in hardware). With any additional devices that you could add and remove, ALSA became a more serious limitation, depending. You could usually choose your audio devices (including microphones) at least at the beginning of a video conference / playing a movie etc, but it was janky (unreliable, list of 20 devices for one multi-channel sound card) and needed explicit support from all applications. Not sure if it ever worked with Bluetooth.
> Not sure if it ever worked with Bluetooth.
It does, with the help of BlueALSA[0].
[0] https://github.com/arkq/bluez-alsa
I remember ALSA. Sure, it was finnicky to use `alsamixer` to unmute the master channels now and then, but I personally never had any trouble with it.