Reverted to plain Jack2 and PulseAudio bridge after having SEVERE XRUNS problems with Pipewire compared to the legacy drivers ON THE SAME HARDWARE.
Suddenly yesterday the Focusrite Gen 1 18i20 that I had been using for 10 years flawlessly did not work anymore after an update (only) on Ubuntu 22.04.1.
This interface needs to toggle the USB SYNC to un-mute audio. Normally done with QASMIXER, but QASMixer now showed UI with different options and the SYNC toggling did not work.
Reverted to ALSAMIXER, but got this error: ALSA lib dlmisc.c:337:(snd_dlobj_cache_get0) Cannot open shared library libasound_module_ctl_pipewire.so
That was suspicious, because pipewire had never been installed.
Removed pipewire (sudo apt-get remove Pipewire). then the whole GNOME desktop disappeared after reboot. Reinstalled it with sudo apt-get install gnome. This was the 2nd time that happened after removing pipewire, so not an coincidence. Spend hours to reconfigure GNOME back to the preferred way.
After that QASmixer UI had the setting was before and USB SYNC worked fine.
The risk is that pipewire, even it is really great for aggregation of hardware, if not ready for prime-time and when there are issues, the PW folks point to Ubuntu and the other way around, leaving the users behind with non-functional hardware.
It may be better if Canonical refrains from Pipewire from default into the distribution before they have actually tested it EXTERNAL audio hardware and not only consumer grade on board audio.
A suggestion could be when PW is not installed, Ubuntu should not install it or give the user options to choose.
Any idea why this could be happening that Pipewire gets installed ?
How to get ALSAMIXER back to work ?
