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PipeWire

A modern multimedia framework for audio and video.

PipeWire handles both audio and video streams with a single graph, replacing PulseAudio (for desktop audio mixing) and JACK (for low-latency professional audio) under one daemon. The same PipeWire instance can also broker screen-share and camera streams to sandboxed applications via PortalGate, which has made it the standard for Wayland desktop screen sharing.

Wim Taymans, who also worked on GStreamer, started PipeWire in 2017 at Red Hat. The project is MIT-licensed and ships with PulseAudio-compatible and JACK-compatible APIs, so existing audio applications work unchanged while users gain PipeWire's unified routing and lower-latency design.

PipeWire is now the default audio server on Fedora, Ubuntu (since 22.10), and most other modern desktop distributions. Adoption has been smooth precisely because of the compatibility layers — most users who switch don't notice anything has changed except that screen sharing and Bluetooth audio work better than they did under PulseAudio alone.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install pipewire
Fedora/RHEL:   already preinstalled on Workstation
Arch:          sudo pacman -S pipewire