George Kiagiadakis
November 02, 2021
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Today marks an exciting day as Fedora 35 has now been released, with WirePlumber as the default session manager for PipeWire! Under development by Collabora since 2019, and previously adopted in the automotive space by Automotive Grade Linux, WirePlumber has now officially entered the linux desktop space and is the recommended session manager to accompany PipeWire, with other distributions expected to follow very soon.
WirePlumber brings some new and interesting things to the desktop. Most notably, it introduces the ability to easily modify the overall behavior of PipeWire for different use cases, using Lua scripts. This allows power users as well as developers of use-case specific distributions or desktop environments to customize their multimedia experience and get the most out of PipeWire. Recently I gave a talk about how this Lua scripting mechanism works, which you can watch here.
Additionally, WirePlumber comes with a library that provides a high level object model to interface with objects in PipeWire, enabling application developers to more easily integrate PipeWire control functionality into their applications. This can help in transitioning away from the PulseAudio API in the forthcoming future, as most graphical applications like desktop environment sound settings dialogs and mixer applications are still using the PulseAudio API to interface with PipeWire.
If you are trying WirePlumber in Fedora 35 (or in any other distribution) and have suggestions to make or issues to report, please let us know in the issue tracker and/or drop by the PipeWire discussion channel (matrix: #pipewire:matrix.org / oftc irc: #pipewire) to discuss. Contributions are also more than welcome. And to all of you who have already been using WirePlumber, testing it, submitting issues and patches... thank you!
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