My switch to PipeWire on Arch has been mostly painless except for one particularly annoying bug that I haven't been able to track down yet -- when the computer is hibernated, something in the config goes wrong and I need to rerun `alsactl init` to get sound playing again.
I'm certain this has something to do with me doing a bad install and not cleaning up old config files or something, possibly with either me either using PulseWire or not using PulseWire to manage the session, but it's pretty annoying (although apparently not annoying enough to get me to debug the issue).
Otherwise, it seems to basically just work. I'd love to do more with it, but truthfully I didn't really dig into Pulse/Alsa/Jack enough initially to really notice what the benefits are, so I can't tell a difference.
One thing I'd love is for a cleaner command-line interface to handle sinks, particularly when scripting. I'm sure if I took the time I'd understand them, but I find PulseAudio's sinks really annoying to work with and to manipulate. Again, I think this is mostly just the fact that I never really dug into Linux audio too deeply before so I'm not always completely sure what's going on with it, and I'm not doing anything complicated enough for me to immediately tell a difference. In some ways I guess that's a recommendation; if I managed to get the hibernation bug fixed then this would be a totally transparent switch from my perspective. That seems kind of impressive.
I'm certain this has something to do with me doing a bad install and not cleaning up old config files or something, possibly with either me either using PulseWire or not using PulseWire to manage the session, but it's pretty annoying (although apparently not annoying enough to get me to debug the issue).
Otherwise, it seems to basically just work. I'd love to do more with it, but truthfully I didn't really dig into Pulse/Alsa/Jack enough initially to really notice what the benefits are, so I can't tell a difference.
One thing I'd love is for a cleaner command-line interface to handle sinks, particularly when scripting. I'm sure if I took the time I'd understand them, but I find PulseAudio's sinks really annoying to work with and to manipulate. Again, I think this is mostly just the fact that I never really dug into Linux audio too deeply before so I'm not always completely sure what's going on with it, and I'm not doing anything complicated enough for me to immediately tell a difference. In some ways I guess that's a recommendation; if I managed to get the hibernation bug fixed then this would be a totally transparent switch from my perspective. That seems kind of impressive.