I love Pipewire, Pipewire fixed bluetooth headphone reliability. For years I had frequent trouble where the bluetooth headphones and bluetoothctl would both say they were connected, but there was no audio sink for pulseaudio. Sometimes there would be audio, but it would be crappy mono audio in "headset mode". For three or four years I had this problem several times a week. I believed this was an issue with the linux bluetooth drivers until one day, after several unsuccessful cycles of reloading, restarting and rebooting everything I got fed up enough to install Pipewire (which was unexpectedly painless.) From that moment on, not once have my headphones failed to connect on the first attempt. I've concluded that there's something fundamentally wrong with the way Pulseaudio recognizes and responds to a bluetooth speaker being connected, and Pipewire obviously doesn't have this flaw.There's a popular narrative of "linux enthusiasts hate anything that's new"; you hear this a lot from people defending Pulseaudio and SystemD from "the trolls". It was never true. People love new things when the new thing solves their problems, and hate the new thing when it introduces new problems. The haters narrative is little more than cope; a way for the authors of buggy software to rationalize the negative response to their software.
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