Stephen Morris:

Pipewire doesn't work. It was videos not playing without audio
muted that started this thread. And from what I've seen on the net
there is potentially a lot of manual configuration required to get
pipewire to work, so my view on what I'm seeing is pipewire is not
exactly stable.

Tim:

It does on my Fedora 36 installation, without me doing anything.  I
did a default fresh install, and this's what it installed, I didn't
do any customisation of audio:  It has pipepire and wireplumber,
there's no pulseaudio.

Stephen Morris:

I've just gotten back on after a fresh install, because I tried a 
suggestion in an earlier thread to remove packages by passing 
dependencies and removed pulseaudio and after doing that and rebooting 
both Gnome and KDE refused to start.
I installed F36 from a live cd and it installed both pipewire and 
pulseaudio and configured the system to use pulseaudio, and youtube 
videos play properly with sound.

I should add my (fresh) install was a MATE-Compiz spin, with no other
desktop systems installed.  So we may have different defaults.


[tim@fluffy ~]$ rpm -qa \*pulse\*
pulseaudio-libs-15.0-5.fc36.x86_64
pulseaudio-libs-glib2-15.0-5.fc36.x86_64
pulseaudio-utils-15.0-5.fc36.x86_64
pipewire-pulseaudio-0.3.61-1.fc36.x86_64


[tim@fluffy ~]$ rpm -qa \*pipe\*
libpipeline-1.5.5-2.fc36.x86_64
pipewire-codec-aptx-0.3.59-1.fc36.x86_64
pipewire-0.3.61-1.fc36.x86_64
pipewire-libs-0.3.61-1.fc36.x86_64
pipewire-jack-audio-connection-kit-0.3.61-1.fc36.x86_64
pipewire-alsa-0.3.61-1.fc36.x86_64
pipewire-gstreamer-0.3.61-1.fc36.x86_64
pipewire-pulseaudio-0.3.61-1.fc36.x86_64
pipewire-utils-0.3.61-1.fc36.x86_64

I'm inclined to say if you've got a working system, then don't try
swapping pulseaudio for pipewire, or vice versa.  Stick with a working
system.

I wonder if your prior research showing pipewire needed lots of
configuration was to do with people using it like jack?  So they can
plumb *this* through *that* for special purposes.  I had a brief dabble
with that trying several different audio recording software programs
and gave up for it being hideously complex and ill-explained.

I work in audio-video production, and patching hardware into extremely
complex combinations is something I'm well used to (since the 1990s). 
But I find the computing fraternity's attempts to do similar things
always terribly mangled.  Audio workstations are a nightmare.  Way too
much like the old domestic Tascam 4 channel cassette decks with people
submixing and overdubbing all over the place to cope with its lack of
enough tracks, and its oddball input channels configuration.

So I don't go much past Audacity, and manual editing that's not all
that far removed from 1/4" tape-editing with tape and razor blades.