PipeWire

To use PipeWire, install the pipewire package.

pipewire(1) should be started as a user. Use the autostarting mechanism of your desktop environment or startx. The pipewire package provides pipewire and pipewire-pulse system services, but they are not recommended for a typical setup.

PulseAudio replacement

PipeWire can start a PulseAudio server. While it's possible to modify pipewire.conf(5) for auto-starting the PulseAudio server, it's recommended to start it from the same place where you start PipeWire by executing pipewire-pulse. This keeps the PipeWire configuration file unmodified for smoother future upgrades.

Before starting pipewire-pulse, make sure that the PulseAudio service is disabled and that no other PulseAudio server instance is running.

To check if the replacement is working correctly, use pactl(1) (provided by the pulseaudio-utils package):

$ pactl info

[...]
Server Name: PulseAudio (on PipeWire 0.3.18)
[...]

Bluetooth audio

For bluetooth audio to work, install the libspa-bluetooth package.

ALSA integration

Install alsa-pipewire, then enable the PipeWire ALSA device and make it the default:

# mkdir -p /etc/alsa/conf.d
# ln -s /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.d/50-pipewire.conf /etc/alsa/conf.d
# ln -s /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.d/99-pipewire-default.conf /etc/alsa/conf.d

JACK replacement

Install libjack-pipewire.

Use pw-jack(1) to launch JACK clients manually:

$ pw-jack <application>

Alternatively, override the library provided by libjack (see ld.so(8)). The following approach will work on glibc-based systems:

# echo "/usr/lib/pipewire-0.3/jack" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/pipewire-jack.conf
# ldconfig

Troubleshooting

The Pulseaudio replacement requires the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR environment variable to work correctly.