In May of this year, Canonical announced that it will use Pipewire to replace PulseAudio in the latest Ubuntu 22.10 (codenamed “Kinetic Kudu”), making the former the default audio server for Ubuntu, and users will no longer need any adjustments in the future.

Ubuntu’s upstream Debian has recently made a similar change, and they will push to make Pipewire the default audio server in Debian 12, which will be released next year.

In mid-September, maintainer Jeremy Bicha from Canonical submitted a Switch to PipeWire report in the Debian Bug, in which he stated:

Debian GNOME 11 already uses PIpeWire for video, which is a GNOME requirement for remote screen sharing on Wayland. And by the end of 2022, most GNOME distributions will have PipeWire enabled as the default audio server. So I recommend doing the same in Debian 12.

After a period of hard work, developer Jeremy Bicha’s recent commit shows that he switched Debian’s default audio service to PipeWire by updating gnome-core, but this currently only affects GNOME users on Debian.

Ubuntu and Debian switched the default audio server to Pipewire successively, and also kept up with the rhythm of Linux distributions such as Fedora, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Pop!_OS, etc. After all, these latter distributions have already used PipeWire by default on the desktop.

As the next major Debian release, Debian 12 is expected to be released around mid-2023.