Elive installer allows you to pick alsa instead of the default pulseaudio, making your system use alsa in the most compatible way correctly working with applications.
Alsa has a slightly better audio quality in some hardware and takes less resources (useful for very low end machines)
Now there's pipewire, what we should do with that ?
Replace pulseaudio with pipewire in the new trixie systems ?
Make the audio system to be selected by the user on installation so that he will pick between the 3 options ?
Personally, I've never gotten round to using pipewire so I have no idea what the benefits are.
Someone like @Rory who is into sound might know more or has tried it.
I do know that AV linux is now based on Trixie and apparently uses an enhanced version of pipewire and runs on E27. Considering they are very sound oriented, this might be a thought in favour of pipewire.
OTOH we'll also have to check how dependent pipewire is on systemd.
I will chime in with this: Pipewire is really nice when you're using professional audio software on Linux because it has a compatibility layer you can install for JACK. I remember JACK being a huge pain when using it with Pulseaudio, but with Pipewire it just works out of the box (as long as you have the compatibility layer installed).
I've been using Pipewire now completely. Does not depend on systemd (got rid of that a long time ago) and best thing is Easyeffects in which i can enhance laptop sound dramatically using the convolver and some presets for Lenovo laptops.
There is Pulseeffects for using with pulseaudio, but the developer ditched that few years ago and just kept on working with Easyeffects for Pipewire.
Running systemd-free Elive now on two laptops Lenovo T480s and T490.
But for the lazy i can summarize that the speakers in laptops nowadays are designed in a way that the best sound out of them is done by tweaking the output sound with a specific waveform. That's why sound in Linux usually sounded like tin can. Sound driver makers for winsloth are not actually sharing the information how they get better sound out of the speakers.
Yeah, Minifree Ltd is run by "Libreleah", who helped us out tremendously when this awful troll tried to get Elive removed from wikipedia.
Without him/her/them, I wouldn't have been surprised if the troll had gotten his way ultimately.
So if you're looking for a totally free machine (that is including the BIOS/Firmware) give that a go. I'm sure Libreleah will even pre-install Elive if asked to do so.
I agree with @TheTechRobo and @Wizor on PipeWire. I'd rather use that than PulseAudio, though really, they're both good. I did dabble with JACK (and PipeWire's own connection interface) when I was playing around with MuseScore and MIDI stuff, but haven't done either for a while.
The Pulse Audio or PipeWire plugin for effects (EasyEffects now might work for both?) are nice, but do chew up a fair amount of system resources (especially compressors and such), so I don't care for them anymore. I have a big USB-based set of speakers that can get LOUD and the only adjustments to the envelope I make is with the Audacious built-in equalizer (it does have some interesting other "effects", not audio-purist types like you find in EasyEffects, but possibly useful). Works fine for me.
