I’m sorry. I shouldn’t even know what Pulse Audio is. It should just quietly do it’s thing. The fact that I know it’s name tells you enough. I have to constantly kill it in order to stop terrible audio distortions. It often struggles managing multiple audio sources from different applications. It completely fails at managing bluetooth devices often forcing audio output that sounds like AM radio and requiring a complete system reset in order to allow high fidelity output. Pulse Audio is the worse and most unacceptable part of my Linux Distro and should be completely abandoned as a total failure and an embarrassment to any developer who is shameless enough to take credit for working on it.

  • Arsen6331 ☭
    6•1 year ago

    It seems Linux Mint 20 may not have all the packages you’d need to replace Pulseaudio. You may want to think about updating to a newer version. Otherwise, you can still make it work but you’d need to acquire the packages manually as they’re not in the repos.

    What you need is pipewire, wireplumber, and pipewire-pulse. Then, you can do

    systemctl --user disable --now pulseaudio
systemctl --user enable --now pipewire
systemctl --user enable --now wireplumber
systemctl --user enable --now pipewire-pulse

    That should replace pulseaudio and enable a compatibility layer allowing pulseaudio programs to seamlessly interface with pipewire.

    • @lxvi@lemmygrad.mlOP
      5•1 year ago

      I didn’t even realize my version was out-of-date. I just upgraded to 20 a few months ago. WhoamI suggests that Pipewire is the standard sound server system in version 21 already, so I guess the Mint team was ahead of me about being done with pulseaudio.

      I think it’s really cool you can just transition something as integral as the sound server system with essentially a few on/off switches.

      I wish I was a better operator. Linux is an incredible system and I have the faintest idea about how to do anything with it.