One day that will for sure be the standard, but for now, I will keep what I have. Why? Everything just works. I don't even think about it. Quad channel audio as well.

Old saying... "If it isn't broke, don't fix it." Oh how I like to get in trouble on Linux sometimes when I am bored and fix and replace when I don't need to so I need to read those words more! I have broken my audio before messing with Pipewire so I know.

Exactly. No reason to mess with something that already works perfectly. Playing from two sources at the same time works too. I did it back when I played a lot of Civ 4, and liked to listen to my own music in the background, or long-form youtube videos.

Yeah, that's great. I actually like the idea of running just ALSA. The thing is I don't know if I can do that and still run KDE Plasma and it feels more fragile than when I have PipeWire running.

You describe exactly what I am running. KDE Plasma with ALSA with the backend, and Pulse Jack and Pipewire on top.

Works great.

Well...yes everyone has ALSA as part of the kernel. What I was saying is I don't know that it would be possible to run KDE with only ALSA and no sound server.

ALSA has one flaw... It is single source. You need something in front of it like Jack, Pipewire, or Pulse to act as a mixer. It would run, but for example if you had some music playing, than something else would not play as your music player would be utilizing all of ALSA.

Would it work? Yes. But not ideal.

I vaguely remember something about setting dmix:sound_card_name as the destination, rather than hw:sound_card_name to get multiple sources (movie/music and KDE desktop sounds) working with "pure" ALSA.
It's a bit hazy, though.

Currently my own programs usually default to hw:..., as that allows me to easily auto-detect the number of channels. Some of my soundcards are special purpose ones with input channels numbering in the double digits.

This is wrong, as said several times in this thread already. I am one of those people who listen to music or podcasts while working on games, with no problem to get audio from both.

I did not have to setup any specific configuration, I am using ALSA "out-of-the-box" on a Debian.

Just a note... But I used to run Debian many moons ago, and I seem to recall that it installs Pulse out of the box, so unless you removed it, it should be there.

Edit: Yeah, I found it on the Debian pages: https://wiki.debian.org/PulseAudio

Note two of the desktops don't have it, but most of them do. If you are running one of the ones that are not using it, it might be interesting to see your configuration so that I can understand how ALSA is doing the mixing. I have never heard of ALSA mixing without a server in front of it. If I recall correctly, this is why the move to Pipewire is coming as a standard because ALSA doesn't mix on its own.

Debian itself does not install any default sound server. But the included desktop environments can depend on one, like Gnome that depends on PipeWire (and used to depend on PulseAudio).

I use a custom-made environment based on Openbox and ROX-Filer, but as I wrote earlier I did not setup any custom ALSA configuration. So what is in use is what is provided by the libasound2-data package.

<i>lands with a loud anticlimatic thumk</i>

Going to be honest, not sure I understand why you'd not have PipeWire installed. It completely replaces and supplants the previous audio services.

Pulseaudio was hairy & scary, Pipewire is free of cobwebs and code debt.

You obviously know more about it than I do as used to have that problem where I just had ALSA and it couldn't play anything but one stream at a time (Gentoo install) until I added Pulse back then. Pipewire didn't exist yet I don't think as I don't remember it. I eventually moved to Debian as I was tired of maintaining my own system and things would break that I had to manually fix or add compile flags for and I just didn't have the time. I moved off Debian because the software was always out of date unless I manually installed my own, so I wanted a rolling release. Arch, being like what I wanted, but I didn't want any maintenance as I don't have the time like I once did so I ended up on Manjaro for now and it is pretty much everything I wanted.

Anyway, lately I am using the default Manjaro install for audio and they nailed it. Everything just works. Has all 4 subsystems installed.which is what I mentioned above. I never have a single problem with audio anymore.

I still have a Gentoo NAS that I haven't turned on in a long time (be lucky if the HD actually spun up), and I still run Debian on my arcade box, but Manjaro for desktops now days. Love it. Great OS.

This is the exact same argument used by PulseAudio fans to disparage libalsa. What exactly does PipeWire do that I need? Why would I want to jump on the latest fad? PulseAudio offered nothing to me, and I doubt PipeWire offers me anything, either. This and the OP also seem to imply that it's an all-or-nothing thing, just like PulseAudio was. In other words, not a wrapper library that doesn't care what other apps use. Presumably that means they at least provide an ALSA compatibility shim, like pa does, or an OSS shim, like ALSA does?

So it has an all new API, incompatible with all previous attempts? All previous code must be rewritten? Wow, what an advantage! Good thing their API is perfect, unlike all previous attempts.

Hey, just like Rust is being introduced en masse to the kernel, sometimes the future happens. And in that case, it means that there is no need for ALSA, PulseAudio, and JACK because those have all become rolled into the capabilities of Pipewire. The literal point of Pipewire was to create one solution which is inclusive of previous solutions without the need of them to be there.

It's nicely encompassing while also extending forward comparability. Instead of having 3 audio server stacks, you have one audio server, and the previous audio servers are modules instead. Much less scary.

Addendum: And it's been introduced en masse, either secretly or silently and I've nary seen a peep from most users. In fact, it's been a complete turnaround from the past decade, when it was a complete nightmare to manage audio across at least 3 different protocols.

I'm going to assume you don't use FireFox either. Because it broke whenever my app tried to use ALSA without pipewire-alsa installed.

If you did that your app would take exclusive use of the device would it not? I was not able to do that (at least with pipewire installed) because the device was not available. I had to open a pcm as "default". But unless you want exclusive access I think that's what you want.

One issue though is if I don't have pipewire installed any settings like custom buffer sizes are not honored by alsa. It wants to use a 4K buffer no matter what. The app doesn't seem to have control. I alsa get console messages about buffer underruns despite everything sounding fine. Other times it runs without any messages. It's weird. With pipewire-alsa installed all this goes away though.