port from pulseaudio to pipewire for audio support

Development
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https://wiki.debian.org/PipeWire

For Debian 11, PipeWire can be used to replace PulseAudio.

Risky but seems to be we can make the switch for whonix 16 if needed.

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Not sure if they will push this change before debian bookworm release.

Qubes still on pulseaudio (version 4.2 might support pipewire)

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Since pulseaudio isnā€™t compatible with wayland and pipewire is the new thing nowadays, port to pipewire needs and can be done.

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related:

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xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin:

xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin has a menu option for pavucontrol and they work with pipewire drivers.

pavucontrol:

source: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/o6hc1n/pavucontrol_for_pipewire/

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alsa-utils:

libasound2:

pipewire-audio:

  • reverse-depends pipewire-audio: Reverse-Depends: gnome-core
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potential bug:
wireplumber: High cpu usage

wireplumber is a Depends: of pipewire-audio.

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Works for me in the developers repository.

Tor Browser has functional sound.

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pipewire:

  • No need to depend on it because wireplumber, pipewire-alsa, pipewire-jack and pipewire-pulse depend on it.
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This is now in the testers repository.

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I can confirm pavucontrol works with pipewire an pipewire-pulse even on Wayland. Tested on Gnome, Sway and KDE.

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Wireplumber is not needed afaik.

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As said:

Feel free to test other package combinations and report any (non-) differences.

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Bug. PipeWire maybe not ready for prime time:

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Qubes-Whonix port to PipeWire:

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Pipewire in bookworm is quite old, with known bugs. But it works most of the time and is default in debian-12 in R4.2 already.

To switch, there need to be pipewire-qubes package installed and also pipewire-pulse (which is recommended by the former). That said, I had mixed results as for automatic switch by just adjusting dependencies. Sometimes manual action was necessary to force the switch (some of those pipewire packages conflict with pulseaudio ones).

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Now in the testers repository.

The following packages will be REMOVED:
  pulseaudio-qubes
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  dbus-user-session liblua5.3-0 libpipewire-0.3-0 libpipewire-0.3-common
  libpipewire-0.3-modules libspa-0.2-modules libwireplumber-0.4-0 pipewire
  pipewire-bin pipewire-pulse pipewire-qubes rtkit wireplumber
The following packages will be upgraded:
  qubes-whonix qubes-whonix-shared-packages-recommended
  qubes-whonix-workstation-packages-recommended
3 upgraded, 13 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 2,661 kB of archives.
After this operation, 11.4 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

Audio in Tor Browser on YouTube working.

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Optional, manual legacy package removalā€¦

sudo apt purge pulseaudio*

The following packages will be REMOVED:
  pulseaudio* pulseaudio-qubes* pulseaudio-utils*

sudo apt autoremove       

The following packages will be REMOVED:
  libfftw3-single3 libpulsedsp

Letā€™s see which packages remainā€¦

dpkg -l | grep pulse

ii libpulse0:amd64 16.1+dfsg1-2+b1 amd64 PulseAudio client libraries

A dependency of other packages, just a library, is ok.

ii pipewire-pulse 0.3.65-3+deb12u1 amd64 PipeWire PulseAudio daemon

PulseAudio compatibility layer provided by PipeWire, also ok.

Audio in Tor Browser on YouTube still working. Seems all fine.

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This is now in the stable repository.

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