Roman Žilka <[email protected]> writes: > The OP of 961764 gives the the Firefox issue as the only specific > rationale for the change. If Firefox has no audio without PA/PW, > enable it just there, not in everything.
If PA/PW/JACK/sndio/... are used, then the audio "stack" (though "hack"
seems more apt) provided by alsa-lib through dmix et al. isn't usable.
> 936101 proposes enabling pipewire just because it's spread into
> multiple packages and PA is becoming obsolete. That is no reason to
> enable the flag for everyone by default.
Uh? Yes it is. Most desktop programs are written to utilize
PulseAudio-style playback APIs, and the current actively developed
provider of those is PipeWire.
Ergo, if the goal is working sound out of the box (and it is on a
desktop profile), then PipeWire is desirable by default.
> 927245 was started mostly becasue of the screencast flag. That is
> hardly needed by most people. The OP only mentions the pipewire flag
> on a side note and gives no specific reason for enabling it by default
> (only saying that it's spread into into more and more packages -
> again, that is no reason).
I'm inclined to dismiss the claim of "hardly needed by most people"
because you and I both have no evidence to show for or against the
claim.
But, the statements above apply: due to the previous proliferation of
PulseAudio in most desktop-oriented distros, most programs expect
PulseAudio-compatible APIs. PipeWire currently provides those best. On
top of that, it also provides needed infrastructure for screen capture
and helps with web cameras.
> None of that justifies imposing pipewire on everybody by default.
> Granted, I don't have the time to go through the whole mailinglist
> discussion and the bugreports.
Nothing was "imposed". Defaults changed. For the better.
See also the "Users not wishing to change" section of the news item in
question.
Indeed, that's why USE flags exist, and package masking, if you wanna be
extra sure.
> I'm afraid Gentoo is blindly jumping on the bandwagon of distros,
> which enable PA/PW unconditionally, but fail to understand how little
> PA/PW is actually needed.
It's not unconditional.
> pI've used Gentoo on desktops for decades - without PA or PW - and
> everything's always worked out of the box IIRC.
I've also. Stuff did not work out of the box. Try changing the volume
of an application-by-application basis for instance. (assuming you are
using alsa-lib and dmix)
Various programs also simply assume Pulse. That's fine, but it's not
"out of the box", then.
> I've used Firefox, too, though not in recent years, and it's always
> had audio by default.
I'm actually unsure when/if that stopped working. I don't recall any
special setup back when I used alsa-lib with and without JACK either.
But I have no reason to doubt that there was a change given the bug
report.
> I use KDE and Kmix now. I haven't used screencasting (outside of
> videoconferencing), for instance, but that's an uncommon use case.
Citation needed.
> PW is a big piece of software, it's a daemon, [...]
No it isn't. That's simply not true (coreutils added for reference):
~$ qsize media-video/{pipewire,wireplumber} sys-apps/coreutils
media-video/pipewire: 629 files, 196 non-files, 37.1M
media-video/wireplumber: 211 files, 154 non-files, 6.5M
sys-apps/coreutils: 312 files, 157 non-files, 37.7M
~$ qlop -d '2026-01-01' -a media-video/{pipewire,wireplumber}
sys-apps/coreutils
media-video/pipewire: 2′59″ average for 6 merges
media-video/wireplumber: 35s average for 1 merge
sys-apps/coreutils: 2′43″ average for 5 merges
The current total resident set size of all PipeWire and
WirePlumber processes on my system is ~60M.
> [...] it spreads throughout the system when enabled.
What does that mean?
> It's horrible.
Citation needed.
> When I don't start it, things put errors into my journal (but sound
> works anyway).
If it's not started, how's it printing anything?
> If you also tell me it's network-facing, I'll start screaming.
What?
> Something as big and unnecessary as PW shouldn't be on by default for
> everybody.
It's not big and it is very useful.
> I implore the maintainers of the desktop profiles to first see if
> PA/PW is truly needed for the majority of users, then make the
> decision.
We don't collect telemetry.
> Based on the three bugs mentioned, it seems like the news item and the
> change mainly happened because more and more software receives support
> for pipewire. That's no reason.
Yes it is.
tl;dr see
https://gitweb.gentoo.org/data/gentoo-news.git/tree/2026-01-15-desktop-profile-pipewire/2026-01-15-desktop-profile-pipewire.en.txt#n124
Have a lovely day.
--
Arsen Arsenović
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
