How do I remove pipewire completely

I tried to return to pulseaudio so I could share audio in zoom. But I can’t seem to get rid of pipewire. If I try to remove it it wants to take everything out. If I remove it without dependencies I can’t get a plasma panel. Is this now so deeply embedded that it can’t be gotten rid of?

How are you trying to remove it?

All you should need to do to switch to PulseAudio is pacman -S pulseaudio .

pipewire is a dependency of kwin. kwin requires a pipewire-session-manager (either pipewire-media-session or wireplumber). I don’t know why it requires it, but it does.

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pipewire and piepwire-media-session are installed by default. I don’t use Pipewire (yet) myself and I still have these packages installed. Having them installed doesn’t do anything since I still have pulseaudio installed.

If you want you can remove these packages:

pipewire-pulse pipewire-alsa pipewire-jack

Just make sure if you’re going back to pulseaudio to have these packages installed:

pulseaudio pulseaudio-alsa pulseaudio-bluetooth paprefs

Edit: the bluetooth one might be optional in case you don’t need/use bluetooth and if you’re on KDE you might need pulseaudio-qt as well.

Can you show us the output of what it says when you try to remove pipewire when you say it wants to “take everything out”, just make sure not to hit Yes to remove before we’ve seen it.

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might want pulseaudio-jack as well

Thanks Guys. I might be a while before I can reply. As I have to do some other work!

I think that explains why if I remove pipewire with Pacman -Rd I can’t start a plasma panel

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yes but why the f*ck should it?

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I installed wireplumber. Not exactly sure what it does but does get rid of an error message in the journal.

If you install pulseaudio, it will be what the applications will use. The fact that pipewire is installed shouldn’t cause any major issues.

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On the same lines, I was wondering what happens if someone is updating from an eos iso that came with pulsaudio, will pulseaudio be removed and replaced with pipewire, or just pulse audio updated?

See for yourself where I do just that! :wink:

Thanks. But to clarify, I was just wondering if sudo pacman -Syu would just leave pulseaudio or automatically remove it and replace with pipewire for updating installs pre-atlantis release.

From your post it seems that pulseaudio will not automatically be replaced or pipewire installed without manual intervention.

According to the devs pulseaudio will NOT be replaced from older EndeavourOS installs when updating. You’ll have to do it manually if you want to install pipewire. I like to stay current and going with the flow, so I had to manually update to pipewire, luckily the process is super simple and so far no issues to report.

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Ok good to know! I don’t know if this info is on the new release page but it might be good to mention that. Will have to check. But I am glad it works that way.

It was mentioned in the comments section of the release notes pages, so technically it’s there :stuck_out_tongue:

So IF i use the EOS iso from 8-27 it will use pulseaudio still & not pipewire?

I think so. Which I think is good in a way because updates only apply to packages you installed, and there is no magic script imposed by eos to automatically switch to pipewire without the user explicitly asking to do so.

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Since I switched back to pulseaudio I have no sound devices in my system settings or in my system tray. pavucontrol works fine. Any clues to get the volume control back in the systray?
Sorted - missing plasma-pa

sudo pacman -R pipewire-pulse pipewire-alsa pipewire-jack piepwire-media-session
sudo pacman -R $(pacman -Qtdq)

and you will get rid of those apps package clean.