• Bug#1103237: pipewire: Enable running pipewire as a system-wide service

    From =?utf-8?Q?S=C3=A9bastien?= Hinderer@21:1/5 to All on Tue Apr 15 10:10:01 2025
    Package: pipewire
    Version: 1.4.2-1
    Severity: wishlist

    Dear Maintainer,

    Could Debian please provide a way to run pipewire (and wirepluber)
    as system services so that only one instance of eachis run for the
    whole system?

    The use-case is for visually impaired users using a screen reader.

    Typically, this means that the speech-dispatcher server is run
    to provide access to TTS engines for client applications like BRLTTY or
    Orca.

    It is super important for us that the screen reader is run as early as
    possible duringthe boot sequence, in order to maximize the hcance that
    we can read the screen in case something goes wrong.

    I do understand that there may be security concerns here and do
    not ask for this to become the default. Just that it is either
    documented how to enable such a setup, or (preferred solution) that
    there is a way to get this set-up through a Debconf question.

    I do believe that, as far as upstream is concerned, nothing
    prevents such a workflow, seee the conversation at

    https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/1610

    It felt reasonable to submit this as a a wish list but please could this be considered important?

    In my case (blind user using BRLTTY): I did manage to set-up
    such a workflow with PulseAudio but it got broken by a system update.
    It feels more future prooof to get the same result with Pipewire
    and have it officially supported.

    I am missing this workflow quite a lot since I am not able at this
    stage to have the access to speech synthesis in the virtual consoles
    whereas I got used to it anditmade me much more productive and
    efficient.

    Many thanks for your time, attention and efforts.

    Seb.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)