Disable Pipewire sound while retaining video/screenshare functionality

Ask Fedora
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4

Nevermind, reinstalled Fedora and managed to achieve exactly what I wanted by doing the following:

  1. sudo dnf swap --allowerasing pipewire-pulseaudio pulseaudio
  2. systemctl --user --now enable pulseaudio.service
  3. Open /usr/share/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf and comment out the lines beginning with api.alsa.*, api.bluez5.* and audio.convert.* under context.spa.libs
  4. sudo pkill -9 wireplumber && systemctl --user restart wireplumber.service
  5. (Optional, only if you want these changes to persist through wireplumber updates, at least I think this was wiped out after I let it be updated) sudo touch /usr/local/bin/replace-config.sh
  6. Copy the edited /usr/share/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf to somewhere else
  7. sudo nano /usr/local/bin/replace-config.sh (or whatever your preferred editor is) and type in the following:
#!/bin/bash
cp /replace/with/path/to/edited/wireplumber.conf /usr/share/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf
chmod 644 /usr/share/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf
  1. sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/replace-config.sh
  2. sudo touch /etc/systemd/system/replace-config.service
  3. sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/replace-config.service and make the contents the following:
[Unit]
Description=Replace wireplumber.conf upon startup

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/local/replace-config.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
  1. sudo systemctl daemon-reload Probably not necessary
  2. sudo systemctl --now enable replace-config.service

This works, but the “replace wireplumber.conf upon startup” part is probably slightly unsettling to some, so… use at your own risk.