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KDE Going all-in on a Wayland future
(blogs.kde.org)
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this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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What made you think that that's a relevant answer?
I specifically said PULSEAUDIO is here to stay, you know, as opposed to manually managing a trillion ALSA devices.
Then I mentioned PipeWire to placate the nitpickers who would point out that PulseAudio (the implementation) isn't actually around anymore, only the device management paradigm.
And somehow you honed into that word, completely ignored everything around it, and said some stuff that sounds vaguely related to the topic at hand, yet has no actual meaning.
Why?
I still have almost no idea what PulseAudio and PipeWire even do, aside from them being two of five(!) different audio-related subsystems that any given sound problem might be related to. (The others being OSS, ALSA, and JACK, which I also don't understand.)
OK, let's see if I remember well:
OSS is obsolete.
ALSA is a basic primitive way to do play audio streams integrated into the kernel.
PA is an abstraction on top of ALSA that helps with network stuff, per-application volume control, …
JACK is an alternative to ALSA/PA for low latency professional use cases: you can plumb it yourself, connect inputs/outputs, …
PW is an efficient implementation of both PA and JACK, which is better than the original PA in latency.