PipeWire 1.0 was released late November (see right), a major milestone in a long journey that I had the opportunity to be a part of. When rumours about PipeWire being a possible successor to PulseAudio had begun circulating in 2018, I was working on a project that was using PulseAudio in an odd way and wanted to explore other solutions. The first PipeWire hackfest was announced that summer and I signed up for it without hesitation. The rest is history.
Thanks to a strong collaboration with Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), the WirePlumber session manager was born shortly after. PipeWire has strong potential to solve problems outside the scope of the Linux desktop, and WirePlumber is a key component in that. By being the orchestrator behind PipeWire’s graph, it was designed to be able to customise the behaviour of the entire system so that it can address different use cases, such as the ones in the automotive realm.