Interesting! While I’ve had no issues with PulseAudio, it seems to divide users who either appreciate and or, loathe it’s usefulness.
Think I’ll wait and see how others are faring with Pipewire as a replacement before making the switch.
Thanks to all for posting their results.
yes same here… seems to be related to the sink:
╭─joekamprad@empowered64 ~
╰─$ pamixer -t && notify-send "mute: $(pamixer --get-mute)" 1 ↵
The sink doesn't exit
I’ve had no audio issues on any of my desktops on any of my hardware so I’m hesitant to bother trying it right now to only introduce a problem.
Weird. rebooted into liquorix kernel and all my volume controls are working again. Was on zen before.
Yeah, my T14 onboard keyboard controls and the external keyboard I have attached to the docking station both shortcut keys work great on my install.
Pipewire is already installed on my KDE along with pulse audio? 
Yes. All 3 of my installs were also, however pipewire-pulse shouldn’t be installed, so it’s most likely not actually DOING anything.
Okay i installed pipewire-pulse but no bluetooth which used to work but i had turned it off so it doesn’t show now and can’t figure out how to get it working again.
Edit: Sound all works as far as i can tell. Don’t have a mic or headphones but normal sound is working as before.
Should be able to turn it back on by opening the gui for bluedevil and clicking on “enable bluetooth”, assuming you’re using bluedevil and not something else, obvously.
I had some audio issues with zoom when I switched to pipewire, so I had to switch back to pulse.
Ya that seems to have disappeared.
Edit: I got Bluetooth back by enabling and starting it again.
i had some issue with zoom uninstalling when i uninstalled pulsaudio and installed pipewire-pulse but then i just reinstalled zoom. maybe you just need to uninstall it and reinstall it? then reboot of course…
I had to install pipewire-pulse in order for it to be picked up in the pactl info. Prior to that and just installing pipewire my laptop wasn’t recognising it.
I messed with this last week - with my main player (Plex Media Player) currently I need to launch with a script:
#!/bin/bash
# PULSEAUDIO
systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.socket systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.service
plexmediaplayer
sleep 5
systemctl --user start pulseaudio.service
This allows me to set Audio to HDMI, Auto select channels, and set the device (HDA Intel HDMI 1) with passthrough ticks it means sound comes out as it should (from 2.1 up to 5.1 channels, Dolby formats, master audio etc). ‘Normal service’ resumes a second or so after closing Plex, and pulse kicks back in.
I couldn’t get it to work with pipewire, so I guess I’ll hang on a while longer…
High hopes for pipewire though, Linux Audio is a frikkin mess.
Works well here*, but can’t figure out my Bluetooth earbuds, but am too brain-dead to try to fix tonight 
*sound & microphone
So the short answer seems to be that it isnt
I’d argue that it is better, that is of course if you don’t mind bloat and breaking updates for pulseaudio (however pipewire is just too fresh to be considered THE solution yet.)
Nearly though, bluetooth is not a deal breaker for me.
I tried it and liked it for the most part. I just need to figure out how to adjust my i3 config in i3bar because as it is it breaks some of the functionality that pulse offers.
I would agree…for now. It works on all 3 of my systems. Bluetooth works fine on all 3 with it. However, WORKS, and WORKS PERFECTLY are 2 different things. It crackles when changing tracks on Clementine. It gets the odd errors about no audio hardware on bootup on 1 machine (then shows the audio hardware as soon as you do something that invokes audio). So lots of growing pains yet. But it’s the (very nice-looking and optimistic) future, so I’ll stick with it.
I think the ability to run Jack services through it, without actually having to install and configure Jack, will be the “killer” feature that pushes this.