Helping make PipeWire suitable for the Linux desktop so quickly has been WirePlumber as a more featureful alternative to PipeWire's default session manager. Out today is WirePlumber 0.4.6 as the latest step forward on that front.

2022 will hopefully be the year that we find PipeWire to be common among desktop Linux distributions for managing audio/video streams and further build off its successes that really got going in 2021. With the rise of PipeWire is also WirePlumber for session/policy management that wraps the PipeWire APIs and offers a modular design.

WirePlumber 0.4.6 offers up a wide range of fixes, improves the logic for determining the default target device, now switches to headphones by default when wire headphones are plugged in, enables real-time priority for the Bluetooth nodes to run in RT, makes the default stream volume configurable, and a range of other updates.

The full list of changes for WirePlumber 0.4.6 and downloads via FreeDesktop.org GitLab .

In case you missed it yesterday, PipeWire 0.3.43 was also released with many changes.