Subject: pipewire: Enable running pipewire as a system-wide service

From: Sébastien Hinderer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2025 09:49:59 +0200

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.