Two additional commands I regularly use as a Sysadmin are
systemctl status without any unit to list show the general system status (lists units that are running, units that are starting and failed units right at the top) And then systemctl list-units --failedTo show me just the failed units and did deeper what the problem is.
On a properly set up system I should quickly be able to ascertain if everything is “up and running” just by systemds status
I’m always hopeful, but there was another state/city in Germany (Munich I think?) that tried to do this a long time ago, then after 10 years of not being able to move entirely over, they moved back to MS, then I think they tried again. Really flip-flopped a lot. I think stuff like this needs to be more organic in its movement rather than big bangs and milestones. Just let it creep in and take over.
The problem with that story is that is doesn’t make any sense. Why would Microsoft spend Millions for one city in Germany? It feels more like a story to get clicks.
In our home the desktop Linux marketshare is 100% 😋
Although just under 2% on Steam isn’t a lot, it seems to be growing slowly. Gaming on Linux is amazing today compared to 2005 when I switched to Linux.
As an author of a book published by Packt, I understand this but still wish people could tone that down from, “none of the books…” to “some” but yeah. Mine has 5 stars in amazon and I know there are many which are well reviewed or have been very useful for my own learning.
I’ve been using Pipewire for a while, it was great because I could use my Bluetooth headset with a better audio Codec than in Pulseaudio. Unfortunately, my headset stopped working one day suddenly with Pipewire. (maybe after a dist-upgrade?) No amount of disconnecting, unbonding etc. would work. Went back to Pulseaudio as a sound server. Sad.
Neither Pulseaudio nor Pipewire remember to use by screen speakers (hdmi) as default, though. It always switches back to the internal sound card.
Really, it’s as simple as that. Pulseaudio tried to be the systemd of sound and failed succeeded pretty horribly. Even its packaging was horrible, back when it was first put into Fedora and I tried uninstalling, it threatened taking down Libreoffice and Gedit with it.
Shoddy workmanship due to how eager those devs are to push their beta testing software on Production, yeah. And honestly looking back, coming from Fedora, doesn’t surprise me.
Pipewire’s got fantastic JACK support. You can even run standard JACK control GUI’s like Carla on top of it and expect them to work just like they would on regular JACK
I do still have some problems with freewheeling. Ardour always crashes on exports when using the Jack interface, but everything works over the Pulseaudio interface. It might be an Ardour thing, but it doesn’t occur when actually running Jack. So something is actually different with Pipewire.
back when it was first put into Fedora and I tried uninstalling, it threatened taking down Libreoffice and Gedit with it.
I did this back when I was a newbie and somehow destroyed either the display server or some other part of the GUI. Sound issues have made me nervous ever since.
ALSA, Esound, OSS etc were always conflicting pre-pulseaudio. Sometimes you’d get sound, you’d always have to screw around with the sound server settings in different apps between KDE and Gnome apps, and gaming was a disaster. Even just using XMMS2 was a pain with Netscape/Firefox
It was a huge step forward, even with initial teething problems.
The only thing it didn’t solve was low latency (for music production), and that’s really the huge advantage of Pipewire. It did take a while to get there though…
In Xfree86 days, Linux wouldn’t have had a future if PulseAudio wasn’t released. It was one of those critical elements (along with Compiz, XrandR, DRI, Udev, PackageKit and Steam) which actually made Linux competitive against OSX and Windows at the time
I don’t know what universe were you living in, but I remember history vastly differently. No app I ever used ever had problems with ALSA, not even gaming. XMMS or XMMS2 (or Audacious even back then when it was kinda starting) never had issues with Firefox. Only when PA was introduced I started losing audio on various apps, losing volume control, or in a few cases apps would cease listing ALSA as a possible audio output while PA was installed.
I killed PA on my machines hard and never had any issues again, and things pretty much only improved once Pipewire arrived other than having to change one (1) configuration file, and it was properly documented.
This was back in kernel 2.2 / 2.4 days when Xfree86 still needed a configuration file
If you used DE’s like Enlightenment or multiple desktops simultaneously, it only caused more issues.
Also, you HAD to configure what sound server you were using often in many apps, and I seem to recall even needing to set a path in some cases to the dev.
Pulseaudio was only problematic when it was first released.
You may have had a good experience with sound servers back then, but for the rest of us, it was a lot of additional configuration and messing around
Xfree? Who’s talking about that? I’ve only ever had to use Xorg, and I only ever needed to touch its conf file if I needed to fiddle with the refresh rate of an external monitor. (Compared to that, its “”““modern””“” replacement Wayland doesn’t even start a full desktop session on my machine)
No, we’re talking about the crap that was PulseAudio, and how ALSA; which is unrelated to XFree, worked almost flawlessly and barely needed any configuration. Formatted my machine several times and remember there was someties a path to the dev (/dev/snd or something like that usually, I think? I sometimes see it thrown around when doing advanced stuff with stuff like mpv) but I was lucky that when I had to edit my file it was for hardware bugs and not for software things. I… think? nowadays that bug is acknowledged for either at the ALSA or the Pipewire level, haven’t delved enough to check.
Dealing with sound servers on the Linux community does feel like a rarity going-backwards kind of thing: to this day, Firefox for some weird ass-reason dropped ALSA support in favour of PulseAudio. But in Debian, the packaged Firefox versions continue to work with ALSA flawlessly - as if support never was dropped, despite the many versions and changes since. Which suggests me to think Mozilla never actually dropped support, they just flipped a switch somewhere to promote PA instead, which usually comes down to money deals. Mozilla is an expert at that kind of thing.
That’s my point. I’ve been using Linux from before xorg existed. Back in those days, things didn’t auto configure.
Sorry, we’ll agree to disagree here about sound servers…
Just because audio worked perfectly for you, I assure you, it wasn’t the case for everyone else at the time. Not everything defaulted to OSS or ALSA. So, there was often additional configuration involved.
And pulse was the only one to convince everyone to drop their sound servers and provide a way to support them all. That’s a huge accomplishment. Whilst it could be argued that ALSA had the potential to do so, maybe… But they didn’t
It was such a pity they didn’t include JACK support though, because that seriously held back the Linux Music production community (which is mostly seamless in Windows and MacOS)
No idea if that’s the case but they certainly seem to have been made with the same mentality. FOSS has for a while suffered of what I call the “Icaza pest”, trying to bring the Microsoft way of design and programming into Linux. The results and troubles this causes abound, considering eg.: the fart that has been Gnome themes since 3.x, or the Gnome posturing back in the day that “users have no right to change their settings” when modernization of Gnome-terminal, and how it’d interact with stuff like screen and dtach, were discused.
As someone who occasionally dabbles in music production on Linux, I love that Pipewire lets me run JACK and Pulseaudio apps side-by-side without having to jump through hoops.
I used to have to occasionally run this but I’d say it has been at least a couple of years since I last had to. I was a pretty early adopter of pipewire because it solved some Bluetooth issues that pulseaudio had. It has improved immensely since I first started using it.
To be fair (with pipewire*) my audio issues usually related to HDMI audio output which has been a PITA for like 20 years since the days of Xbox 360.
I started using PipeWire as soon as Arch switched the recommended default and I agree, it cleared up a lot of issues and fixed my Bluetooth headset, which was nice.
My 3.5mm issues are complicated by the scenario where I have a extension cable always plugged in but not always my headphone cable (sennheisers stock cables aren’t super long)
I just wanted to add this as a “to be fair” and there is a element of “user error” where I just haven’t put enough time in to really learn pipewire.
Well last night I resolved my problems by making sure to kill all processed owned by the greeter (as seen in my other post thanks to OP^^)
`killall -u greeter’
Now I can enjoy my Ubuntu startup sound in peace /s /volume-warning
Thank you, I added the command to my Linux Journal,
Your post motivated me to do some more trials and it ended up that my greetd greeter was locking up the audio sink.
So I made sure to add a command after the greeter exits killall -u greeter and the sink finally passed correctly to the logged in user just fine after that.
In reviewing the arch wiki some more too I’ve installed wire plumber session manager for pipewire, I am still a little confused about it’s function and relation to pipewire but maybe that has helped too?
Would love to use it, it has the incorrect channel map for my surround sound system which apparently cannot be changed like it can in pulse? After that gets sorted then sure.
my system sets the wrong bitrate for a device but I was able to configure it, you may want to browse the wireplumber wiki and see if its config options can meet your use case
That’s a good tip, it probably can but I’ll need a bit of learning to figure it out. The Linux audio situation is a hell of a learning curve sometimes.
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