KDE and Pipewire...

KenGordon · 2025-12-09T01:08:38+0000

After successfully installing FreeBSD-15.0-RELEASE and KDE, I find that Pipewire is constantly complaining about something. I only see the complaints when I shut the system down, and, so far, have not been able to grab what exactly is the problem. Has anyone else experienced something like this?

I'll try hard to get the exact message next time.

Ken Gordon

cracauer@ · 2025-12-09T01:39:06+0000

Does it work?

KenGordon · 2025-12-09T16:35:23+0000

cracauer@ said:
Does it work?

I can't tell yet. I DO get sound when I use Firefox or Konquerer and listen to www.sundaybaroque.org/listen/, although it is often noisy and stutters, but I cannot tell if that is Pipewire or OSS.

I'll do some more "research".

Later,

Ken Gordon

cracauer@ · 2025-12-09T16:41:20+0000

You can try pw-play(1) to play some random wav file. That should only work if you are indeed going through pipewire.

KenGordon · 2025-12-09T17:05:29+0000

cracauer@ said:
You can try pw-play(1) to play some random wav file. That should only work if you are indeed going through pipewire.

OK. I'll give that a try and will report back.

Thanks,

Ken Gordon

KenGordon · 2025-12-09T17:22:26+0000

I get "Host is down". I am going to "assume" that means that Pipewire is not working. Am I correct?

Ken Gordon

KenGordon · 2025-12-09T17:24:46+0000

Also, KDE tells me that I am using generic USB audio within both Firefox and Konquerer.

BTW, I am finding KDE to be fascinating. Very nice....so far.

Ken Gordon

fmc000 · 2025-12-09T18:36:13+0000

KDE uses pulseaudio.

KenGordon · 2025-12-09T21:01:05+0000

fmc000 said:
KDE uses pulseaudio.

OK. Then why do I see a long list of "complaints" about pipewire? Isn't there some way to tell KDE that pipewire is not needed and to make it go away?

Ken Gordon

drr · 2025-12-09T21:43:07+0000

cracauer@ said:
Does it work?

I have tried running pipewire from konsole to get screen sharing working with firefox, but did not succeed.

cracauer@ · 2025-12-09T22:08:41+0000

KenGordon said:
I get "Host is down". I am going to "assume" that means that Pipewire is not working. Am I correct?

Ken Gordon

Is there a pipewire process running?

fmc000 · 2025-12-10T02:33:33+0000

KenGordon said:
OK. Then why do I see a long list of "complaints" about pipewire? Isn't there some way to tell KDE that pipewire is not needed and to make it go away?

Ken Gordon

The only thing I managed to do is starting pipewire and wireplumber along with KDE, disabling pulseaudio as pipewire runs automatically pipewire-pulse. It worked fine (almost, more on that later) until KDE was updated to the 6.5 branch, where I lost audio completely with this setup.

I also had to run a custom script on KDE exit to kill some stale pipewire and wireplumber processes, otherwise on the next KDE startup I'll end up with many of them.

I then lost interest in that and rolled back to pulseaudio. Now I'm not even using KDE anymore...

KenGordon · 2025-12-10T16:27:31+0000

Well. due to other issues, I have gone back to FreeBSD ver 14.3-RELEASE, dumped KDE and am now trying Lumina, so this thread is no longer of interest. Thanks for the help.

Ken Gordon

cracauer@ · 2025-12-10T16:37:28+0000

KenGordon said:
Well. due to other issues, I have gone back to FreeBSD ver 14.3-RELEASE, dumped KDE and am now trying Lumina, so this thread is no longer of interest. Thanks for the help.

Pipewire might still be of interest, KDE or not. I am warming up to it. In fact it mostly looks to me like a smoother jackd clone with built-in puleseaudio server API.

KenGordon · 2025-12-10T18:44:11+0000

Yes. I am also interested. As soon as I have some other needed stuff finished, I'll dig into that too.

My first concern is getting Pegasus-Mail operational. As soon as I have accomplished that, I can totally and completely dump Windoze, which I have been wanting to do for some time now. WIndoze is getting more and more intrusive and slower than molasses in January.

Besides, I first used FreeBSD way back in version 4.0, and have liked it ever since.

We have 6 computers in our home, most of them built by myself. I am hoping that my wife will become used to using Lumina, or some such.

Ken Gordon