Switching from pulseaudio to pipewire

A fix for media not playing on browsers

Youtube videos aren't playing, not even whatsapp audios, what do I do? — Regretful Arch user

I only do TL;DR versions, so… time to speed run this shit:

Check for updates:

sudo pacman -Syu

When we try to install — conflict:

sudo pacman -S pipewire pipewire-pulse pipewire-alsa wireplumber

Let's remove only pulse audio:

sudo pacman -Rdd pulseaudio

Why is this important? So you don't remove shit that the GUI needs, cause some OS componentes may depend on pulseaudio, you can check with: pacman -Qi pulseaudio, you don't wanna remove them right?

Insall pipewire packages and reboot:

sudo pacman -S pipewire-{jack,alsa,pulse}

Sources

• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1ahptc8/completely_unable_to_play_any_videos/
• https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=273969

System

Linux ** 6.1.153-1-MANJARO #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Fri Sep 19 17:27:31 UTC 2025 x86_64 GNU/Linux