The issue

After installing Fedora, Audio will appear to stutter and stop. This is a issue with Pipewire. I've observed this with the KDE desktop, but it likely happens with Gnome and other desktops.

This post assumes you don't know much about the terminal, so if you're somewhat familiar with computers, it may seem insulting, please do not take it that way.

All you need to know is:

  • The terminal is a program you can find on your computer
  • the terminal name depends on what desktop enviroment you use, essentially, what you use to manage files and open programs.
  • You can usually find your desktop environment in your settings menu, usually under an "About" section.
  • Fedora by default comes with Pipewire as it's audio system. This can have issues on VMWare workstation. We will replace it with the older pulseaudio.

Fixing

    IMPORTANT! - It is important to type the commands in exactly how they appear on the screen, otherwise, you may experience problems.
  1. Open up your terminal
    2. sudo DNF swap --allowerasing pipewire-pulseaudio pulseaudio

    Then enter your password.

    This command looks complicated, let's explain what it does.

    DNF - DNF is the package manager for fedora, it's used to install, update and remove packages, which make up your system.

    swap - This tells DNF you want to replace a existing package with another.

    --allowerasing - This tells DNF that it needs to remove any packages that might conflict with the installation of pulseaudio.

    pipewire-pulseaudio - This one sounds confusing, does this mean pipewire & pulseaudio will be removed? no! pipewire was designed to be a drop-in replacement for pulseaudio, so we're just telling it to replace it with standard pulseaudio.

    pulseaudio - This tells DNF what to replace pipewire with, in this case, pulseaudio.

  2. Once you have run this command, follow the prompts given, it usually amounts to saying yes a few times and waiting. Once done, reboot your operating system.

Reversing

if you wish to reverse the fix, or if the fix didn't fix it, enter the command

sudo DNF --allowerasing pulseaudio pipewire-pulseaudio

And reboot again.