Why should pipewire be run as a user? Will runit services be provided by default someday?

[sburris0]

Hi, being able to run pipewire as a service would be convenient for me. I see the runit service in the source tree and a comment in the run script says:

this service is experimental and most setups should start pipewire as a user,
for further information, please refer to the handbook

• https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/blob/master/srcpkgs/pipewire/files/pipewire/run

But https://docs.voidlinux.org/config/media/pipewire.html doesn't actually discuss this.

1. Why are user services preferred? (I'd like to understand, so I can update the docs)
2. Are user services actually still preferred? I've seen systemd managing pipewire pretty often. Is there any chance pipewire updates have made system services more practical?
3. Would some specific future pipewire change make managing pipewire with runit more feasible? Might runit services be common/recommended for Void in the future?

[classabbyamp]

pipewire should be run as a user because on most systems, whichever user is running the graphical environment is the one controlling and using audio.

you can configure runit user serivces and run pipewire in a service using them. (I personally use turnstile, https://github.com/classabbyamp/dotfiles/tree/master/dot_config/service/pipewire)

systemd-managed pipewire is usually done as a user service, too.