Pipewire vs PulseAudio, general question

My Password Is 1234@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 59 points –

What are the main differences between pipewire and pulseaudio? Which one is better? What are other alternative popular sound servers besides these two?

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I suspect they meant “Hardware Abstraction Layer” for “HAL”

Well if they had actually added something other than "that bad, this good" we might actually know.

I don't think it's entirely necessary to explain the entire topic in a simple lemmy comment about something that is so easy to search for and learn about.

Which is what any OS already is.

I’m assuming it’s a complaint about how low level ALSA is compared to the, E.G. Audio HAL in Android

Well, being low level is exactly what lets to extract better performance, lower latency and other good stuff.

There’s still a fine line to draw between usability and performance

ALSA is too low level for musicians to reasonably understand

Having something like PipeWire to make it easier to configure isn’t a bad thing

People here also are asking for super low-latency

That’s another nice thing about PipeWire.

It supports configuring JACK for you if you need low latency

One person above(Audbol) want to go even lower.