Wayland. It comes up a lot: “Bug X fixed in the Plasma Wayland session.” “The Plasma Wayland session has now gained support for feature Y.” And it’s in the news quite …

Wayland. It comes up a lot: “Bug X fixed in the Plasma Wayland session.” “The Plasma Wayland session has now gained support for feature Y.” And it’s in the news quite …

        • Ullebe1
          7•10 months ago

          Because Pipewire only handles and understands media streams, so it can stream the output of a window or the whole desktop, but only because the Wayland compositor has already composed the windows and other data it gets from the application to a visual and hands the final result to Pipewire.

            • Ullebe1
              2•10 months ago

              Because it is convenient for programs to use Pipewire for screensharing, as those programs can then also use the same Pipewire support for all their audio and webcam needs. Also Pipewire is good at multiplexing the various media streams.

                • Ullebe1
                  4•10 months ago

                  For the multiplexing, as I mentioned.

                  A V4L2 camera can only be opened by a single application at a time, but if that application is Pipewire, then Pipewire can allow multiple applications to make use of it simultaneously. Same thing with ALSA, it’s the reason sound servers exist at all, though I suspect you’re already familiar with that.

                  I also hear that ALSA has some support for multiple applications per device nowadays, though I understand it is much less pleasant to use than a fully featured sound server.

                  • @thalience@lemmy.worldEnglish
                    1•10 months ago

                    I also hear that ALSA has some support for multiple applications per device nowadays, though I understand it is much less pleasant to use than a fully featured sound server.

                    FYI

                    Many older sound chips had hardware support for mixing multiple streams, and so the alsa drivers for those happily allowed multiple apps to open and write to the /dev/snd/whatever device. Life was good and people got used to doing it this way.

                    Nowadays (since like 2000 lol), sound chips generally expect a single pre-mixed stream. So the sound device for those is exclusive open. The libalsa devs made it possible to have the first app to open the sound device act as the sound server for every other app that tries to open it later. But it was complicated and fragile and just a bad idea in retrospect.