Bad Pipewire! Bad KDE Linux!

It’s the end of May, Spring is slowly giving way to Summer as the bees buzz around flowering trees and Pipewire is broken on KDE Linux again. It’s a poetic tale as old as time, well, at least as old as Pipewire. Or KDE Neon. Or both. (or maybe it’s just my janky old system that has been updated too many times and should just be wiped and freshly installed…) At least this time I was able to fix the problem in under 20 minutes thanks to … me??

It seems like just yesterday August 15, 2023 I was writing a post on this very blog about the trouble of finding answers to Linux audio problems. I have since posted to Reddit and a couple other places with fixes and suggestions for others with similar ills. But imagine my surprise when, today, after an update failed I found a solution from my former self!

The Problem

I update all the time. I love updating. Updating only breaks every few months (usually.) But these early days of Plasma 6 see updates having real, positive effects on my system, so I am even happier than usual to pop open a terminal and run the old sudo apt update && sudo apt dist upgrade. I get an error, big deal. Usually easily fixed, but something is different today. It’s wrong, but in a familiar way. There’s a problem with a pipewire package and the version number contains 0.3 — this isn’t good. My first thought is that there is a problem with my upstream pipewire and a downstream Ubuntu package. I entered “kde neon pipewire libpipewire-0.3-modules” on my duckduckgo.com search field and imagine my surprise when the top result was this post to the kde forum by some user going by ‘nodenoise’. That sounds familiar. Of course I know that user — he’s me!

The … fix?

The post above details issues getting upstream pipewire to work on Ubuntu because Ubuntu hates updated pipewire. It meanders through a series of errors and back-and-forths, but settles on the problem arising from old packages borking new or updated ones. As it turns out, this is still somehow an issue, so I try the solution mentioned there: force the installation of the new package and then try to update and fix the system.

sudo dpkg -i --force-overwrite /var/cache/apt/archives/libpipewire-0.3-modules_1.0.7-3~ubuntu22.04_amd64.deb

This time, I didn’t even need the additional remedies of the earlier post and, after running the above command which completed without error, I was able to update and upgrade normally. Ho hum!

The takeaway

Linux audio problems and solutions vary considerably, but these days invariably involve pipewire and configuration issues. Avoiding pipewire is no longer an option, at least for me, so riding these ups-and-downs is necessary. If possible, WrITe oUt tHE sOLutIonS to YoUr oWn FuTurE pROblEms NOW so YoU hAVe tHem whEn yOu nEeD tHem.