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Canonical plans to finally adopt PipeWire as the default sound system in the upcoming Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) release instead of PulseAudio in an attempt to provide better audio for users.
If you were wondering when Ubuntu will finally switch to PipeWire as default for audio, it looks like your wish might come true with the next release of Ubuntu Linux, the Kinetic Kudu, due out later this year on October 20th.
Canonical employee and Ubuntu Desktop developer Heather Ellsworth was the one to reveal the other day on a thread on the Ubuntu Discourse channel the fact that the Ubuntu devs are planning to run only PipeWire and not PulseAudio as the default sound server for the Ubuntu 22.10 release.
The move to PipeWire by default on Ubuntu started with the current release, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish), which ships with both PipeWire and PulseAudio, but PipeWire is only used for screencasting and screen sharing on Wayland while PulseAudio is still being used for the audio processing.
With the upcoming Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) release, PulseAudio will be removed in favor of PipeWire, a move that is also confirmed by the recent changes in the ubuntu-meta package. However, it remains to be seen if the Ubuntu devs also decide to adopt the powerful WirePlumber session and policy manager for PipeWire.
I just checked, as you can see from the screenshot above, and Ubuntu 22.10 no longer runs PulseAudio. And, for now, WirePlumber is not installed by default, but you can install it from the main archives.
PipeWire is currently the most adopted open-source technology by GNU/Linux distributions. Created by Wim Taymans at Red Hat, PipeWire is a server for handling audio, video streams, and hardware on Linux-based systems, and it was already adopted by popular distros like Fedora Linux, Slackware, OpenMandriva Lx, EndeavourOS, and many others.
Ubuntu 22.10 will also ship with GCC 12 as the default system compiler, as well as many of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software, including the upcoming GNOME 43 desktop environment, LLVM 15, systemd 251, GNU C Library 2.36, GNU Binutils 2.39, OpenLDAP 2.6, and probably Linux kernel 5.19.
Last updated 2 years ago
