Well you know how it is on linux, one wrong move and pulseaudio needs restarting lol.

Who does still run pulseaudio when pipewire exists?

People using LTS releases, who do you know... actual work instead of just compiling your kernel over and over.

An LTS releases that are soo old usually run on servers, where pulseaudio is not really a thing.

My distro's compile farm compiles kernels for me (thanks guys!), and switched to pipewire years ago.

Edit: This is incorrect, as pointed out below.

Pulseaudio still does the device juggling etc on most systems even when there's a pipewire backend.

Wrong. Pipewire is pulseaudio-compatible, and the device juggling is done by wireplumber

Are you sure? On every device I could quickly reach (Gentoo, NixOS, Pop OS, all with vanilla/default pipewire configs), `ps aux |grep -i pulse` only turns up pipewire-pulse.

At least pulseaudio is pretty much dead now and we have pipewire.

https://xkcd.com/927/

That is a problem that Linux has, but this is actually one time that it really isn't. Pipewire is flat-out better than pulse, while including sufficient compatibility that it really does just supersede the thing.

Yeah pretty funny when apps are using alsa, pulseaudio and pipewire all on the same system!