Replace pipewire by pulseaudio

General system Gaming, sound and video
1

I was trying to switch from Pipewire to PulseAudio. (Reason: NoMachine does not support pipewire yet)

Reading some articles, it should be as simple as installing pulseaudio, which will prompt to uninstall pipewire. But it appears not that simple.

When I then try to pacman -R pipewire, pacman complaints about a lot of dependendies. Can I simply uninstall all those dependencies without breaking my system?

Name            : pipewire
Version         : 1:0.3.43-5
Description     : Low-latency audio/video router and processor
Architecture    : x86_64
URL             : https://pipewire.org
Licenses        : MIT  LGPL
Groups          : None
Provides        : libpipewire-0.3.so=0-64
Depends On      : rtkit  alsa-card-profiles  libdbus-1.so=3-64  libncursesw.so=6-64  libsndfile.so=1-64  libudev.so=1-64  libusb-1.0.so=0-64  libasound.so=2-64  libsystemd.so=0-64  libbluetooth.so=3-64  libsbc.so=1-64
                  libldacBT_enc.so=2-64  libfreeaptx.so=0-64  libfdk-aac.so=2-64  liblilv-0.so=0-64  libwebrtc_audio_processing.so=1-64
Optional Deps   : pipewire-docs: Documentation
                  pipewire-session-manager: Session manager [installed]
                  pipewire-alsa: ALSA configuration [installed]
                  pipewire-jack: JACK support [installed]
                  pipewire-pulse: PulseAudio replacement [installed]
                  gst-plugin-pipewire: GStreamer plugin [installed]
                  pipewire-zeroconf: Zeroconf support
                  pipewire-v4l2: V4L2 interceptor
Required By     : gst-plugin-pipewire  pipewire-jack  pipewire-media-session  pipewire-pulse
Optional For    : electron13  google-chrome  sdl2


▶ sudo pacman -Rns pipewire                                                       
checking dependencies...
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: removing pipewire breaks dependency 'libpipewire-0.3.so=0-64' required by gst-plugin-pipewire
:: removing pipewire breaks dependency 'libpipewire-0.3.so=0-64' required by pipewire-jack
:: removing pipewire breaks dependency 'pipewire>=0.3.39' required by pipewire-media-session
:: removing pipewire breaks dependency 'libpipewire-0.3.so=0-64' required by pipewire-media-session
:: removing pipewire breaks dependency 'libpipewire-0.3.so=0-64' required by pipewire-pulse
2

Why? What happens when you try to install pulseaudio?

3
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5

And then:

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And when I try to uninstall gnome-bluetooth, it says it breaks blueberry.
So it is kind of cascading through the dependent apps.

6

Okay, I uninstalled blueberry and gnome-blueberry, then retried pulseaudio.

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Looks successful. Let me try.

7

Hmm… is this a problem?

image

Still having no sound on my NoMachine connection…

8

It will do. The better way to do this is to

sudo pacman -S pulseaudio

Extend to replace the dependency too:

sudo pacman -S pulseaudio pulseaudio-bluetooth

Possibly you didn’t log out or reboot after switching sound servers.

Also as a tip, you can copy-paste text output as text and make it smaller for the server and easier to select, quote, refer to, translate, and search.

9

Still not complete removed pipewire:

sudo pacman -R pipewire-media-session pipewire-jack
checking dependencies…
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: removing pipewire-jack breaks dependency ‘jack’ required by ffmpeg
:: removing pipewire-jack breaks dependency ‘libjack.so=0-64’ required by fluidsynth
:: removing pipewire-jack breaks dependency ‘libjack.so=0-64’ required by gst-plugins-good
:: removing pipewire-jack breaks dependency ‘jack’ required by mpv
:: removing pipewire-jack breaks dependency ‘libjack.so=0-64’ required by mpv
:: removing pipewire-jack breaks dependency ‘libjack.so=0-64’ required by portaudio
:: removing pipewire-jack breaks dependency ‘jack’ required by pulseaudio-jack
:: removing pipewire-jack breaks dependency ‘jack’ required by qemu
:: removing pipewire-jack breaks dependency ‘libjack.so=0-64’ required by qemu

Do I really need to remove qemu first?

10

I think if you install jack2 it will remove pipewire-jack withouth breaking all those dependencies.

1 Like
11

Indeed. It did. Thx!

1 Like