On 29/05/2021 15:31, George N. White III wrote:
On Sat, 29 May 2021 at 11:00, Steve Underwood <coppice12@gmail.com mailto:coppice12@gmail.com> wrote:
> [...] When I upgraded from F32 to F33 pulseaudio changed from something with a few quirks, to something very troublesome. The main issue was I had to restart pulseaudio several times after logging in before it would actually find my audio devices. I found the cure was to switch to pipewire. The main long term quirk I had with pulseaudio was that sometimes starting an app, particularly chrome, would make the sound distort, and pulseaudio had to be restarted to recover from this. I haven't seen this problem since changing to pipewire. pipewire does seem to show up in a "top" report as using a bit more CPU. This might be because it is mixing in floating point, or because it just hasn't been that well optimised so far, but its CPU load is only a few percent.You don't mention how capable a CPU you have. There are tradeoffs. Modern processors often have "spare" CPU cycles that are used to advantage, e.g., by measures that reduce memory usage, add features, etc. Many people have vastly overpowered CPU's for their workloads, so developers may be tempted to add features that would not have made sense a few years ago.
With linux, they who develop software chose tradeoffs. Most of them are unlikely to have access to bottom-end hardware for testing It is inevitable that some use cases will suffer collateral damage. This might include your issues with pulseaudio on F34. Collateral damage can occur when drivers are modified to use new capabilities, or when legacy quirks needed to support older modules are removed when a new module eliminates a legacy problem.
-- George N. White III
I have no issues with the CPU power that pipewire is taking. Someone else mentioned that it uses more than pulseaudio, and I concur that this is the case. Since its only a few percent of one core, I don't really care.
Steve