The "I hate Pulse Audio and especially Lennart" crowd tends to want to either go back to "Alsa" or tried at some point to install the old OSS drivers and then gave up.
This means trying to configure dmix to work properly, trying to configure your audio outputs with tools like 'alsamixer' and things of that nature.
This is about a 100% guaranteed approach to screwing up audio in Linux. For years it is what unsuspecting newbies were told by "really smart people" on the internet when faced when any sort of audio issue and all it really does is ensure that their OS audio is going to turn into a dumpster fire.
The only way to fix it is to aggressively find your "custom" audio settings for every application, find all the alsa configuration files and delete them. And then find out where your distribution saves your alsa mixer settings between reboots and link them to /dev/null and reboot.
Audio settings of this nature are very persistent and nothing Pulseaudio or Pipewire can do to help you fix it.
To me it's a low-feature deterministic stack that rarely does what I don't want it to.
But I haven't introduced a bunch of fuel for the fire like bluetooth audio devices either... to each their own.
Well, yeah, since when pulse showed up and started breaking people's audio it effectively replaced alsa (even though they kind of operate at different layers). So if you didn't like that, of course the solution was to rip out Poettering's bugfest and revert to alsa. Thankfully at some point pulse stabilized a lot and in my experience tends to just work out of the box these days, but people tend to have their habits set by the early versions that were pushed out before they were ready.
It's "better than Pulse ever did" because they do not have the same hardware as you, and because whatever they had before was worse.
Lesson 2 about discussing technical issues on the internet: other posters almost certainly do not have the same hardware as you.
(this is also relevant when it comes to discussing software performance - the fact that Slack loads in 5 seconds on your desktop does not make it "fast", because the entire internet does not have your desktop)
Thanks for reiterating my point, I guess.
> Sounds like you have severe issues with both PA and PW. Maybe your hardware is the problem?
Seconding this! My experience with PA and PW has been basically identical to yours. If possible, GP, try some different hardware! You shouldn't have to put up with that crap.
Pulse would cause games to crash or not even start (i know this because switching to pipewire resolved that), for example. Pulse, for me, was beyond broken on every machine I used it, in some capacity. PipeWire is, too, but in a way that doesnt ruin my day ;)
How is that "better than pulse ever did"? The only issue I had with PulseAudio on several machines in last decade or so was Bluetooth A2DP connection being very capricious.
I have recently switched to PipeWire and it actually improved Bluetooth, but I had to disable Wireplumber's libcamera backend because it made it regularly eat 100% of RAM. No complaints after doing that. Crackling noises or desynchronized video playback would instantly take it into "unacceptable" territory.
Sounds like you have severe issues with both PA and PW. Maybe your hardware is the problem?