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Pipewire vs PulseAudio: What's the Difference?
(itsfoss.com)
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Both were just a pain in their own right, IMHO. My previous Focusrite interface was quite fiddly to get working with ALSA and just worked OOTB with Pulseaudio. I also don’t miss messing with ALSA/JACK at all.
Pipewire has pretty much been a drop-in replacement for me, with how it can act as a Pulseaudio backend.
Possibly hardware dependent?
I always had audio hardware that was well supported by ALSA, I never had any ALSA issues until applications stopped supporting it.
Does pipewire interface directly to drivers or is it user-space magic on top of alsa like pulseaudio?
I believe it is U-space on top, but I could be wrong.